Sony Data Discman | Hacker News Reader

Sony Data Discman

huguesjohnson.com

111 pointsnaves37 comments

I have not one but two Data Discmans, unfortunately neither works. I believe both need to be re-capped and disassembling them (correctly) is a bigger task than I'm interested in at the moment. I'm going to have to see if I can get the emulator running and try out the discs I have.

The Data Discman fascinated me ever since I first saw mention of it in a magazine. This was the early 90s so CDs were still Brobdingnagian compared to other storage media at the time. A portable device that could carry an encyclopedia? Amazing! To me at the time they were a Star Trek technology made real.

As an aside I still love Sony's consumer electronics industrial design from the 90s. It was a great intersection of functional and attractive.

If memory serves, they have a notable mention in the Niven-Pournelle novel _Fallen Angels_.

me too! somehow in my retro computing/gadget collecting I ended up with two Data Discmans, a DD-8 and a DD-10BZ, they both work fine and the DD-10 is complete in original box as well.

There is authoring software available at http://www.robotsandcomputers.com/computers/dd8h.htm to create compatible CDRs full of books assuming you can find some blank Mini CD-Rs or CD-RWs.

neat devices, Sony was always ahead of the time

I haven't seen that authoring software before. Now I need to try it. Now you've done it, made me want to replace the caps on my units!

Sony's history of media formats and devices is fascinating. I keep thinking that at some stage they're going to stop creating new ones, but somehow never seems to happen.

This goes into just 6 of the media formats, but there are so many more.

https://www.slashgear.com/1675900/discontinued-sony-formats-...

A more recent example: Archival Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc

What I never got was why MD were never pushed as main rw disc drives on PC. IIRC Rewritable MDs were mainstream long before CD-R and it would have filled an immense need to replace floppy disks at the time (I love vintage and nostalgia, but floppies had way too much io errors, and the speed was.. not really there).

Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..

You could get them, although I've never seen one. I know someone who had a MD data drive on his PC which he used for copying large audio files onto (he had a multitrack recorder that also used them) with the handy advantage that they had considerably more capacity than Zip disks.

Apparently they were reliable but godawful slow, and he was glad to move onto SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards.

Minidiscs had a data capacity of around 150MB, IIRC. By that point Zip drives were already very common so you'd need a compelling reason for MD and I just don't think one was there.

I was young at the time, but weren't zip drives and media much more expensive ?

I just wish pro-sumer LTO tape drives became a thing.

What I had always wanted was a drive that played both music Minidiscs and MD data discs so I could also use the discs for both. At least I don't think there were any dual-use decks or recorders, and I couldn't justify getting a data drive when I already had a recorder. Back in the 90s I always assumed that was because Sony was paranoid about piracy; I even had to buy some kind of device so I could record digital audio from my computer directly onto audio MDs. (If I recall correctly, it's been a while!)

There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long.

The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed: none of them beat the CD on storage density and media cost. By the time the market actually needed a successor to 1.44MB floppies, everyone also had internal hard drives, so a lot of the use of the floppy drive was to install software. The fact that CDs couldn't be written to (yet) didn't matter. The fact that they held 650MB made them mandatory equipment, while every other rewritable medium was just a luxury for professional users working with a lot of data. And CD-Rs and RWs killed that last niche, too, even though they were less convenient[0] than superfloppies were.

[0] Writable optical media is a bit of a hack, necessitating processes like "mastering" and "finalization" to try and make the writable disc look like a regular disc to drives and players that aren't aware of the rewriting process.

> The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed

I wouldn't say Zip didn't catch on, there were a few years where Zip drives were pretty ubiquitous. MD Data had a price problem. The drives were expensive ($500+) and the disks were nearly $30 IIRC. Meanwhile a Zip drives and disks were half that or less.

On the whole they just did not offer enough storage over competitors to justify their price. When CD writers got cheap they were better in almost every way.

Yes, even if Sony had competed the window of relevance was short. But they were always attached to premium pricing, without the product focus Apple later developed.

Sony's always had a very weird obsession with proprietary storage media. I think they resent the licensing model of CD-ROMs (essentially none) and desperately wanted formats they owned and could license out. At the same time their entertainment division would want to hamstring those formats with onerous limitations or DRM.

The end result was Sony always seemed so schizophrenic with storage formats. They'd come out with a format that looked cool on paper but then have some artificial limitation (including stupid prices) that made it unattractive.

It looks dumb because it didn’t work out, but in some alternate universe Sony has more money than Apple and Microsoft combined thanks to a monopolised data format.

It wasn’t just bad luck, it was a failed strategy all along when the tech industry was growing exponentially. That open, cheaper alternatives would undercut them was/is a given.

Zip was fairly defacto RW media between ~1997-2004.

I was in College around that time and the blue Mac G3's in most computer labs had Zip drives, and many PC's in the labs had Zip drives too.

The better bet was MO (Magneto-Optical) which used the same underlying technology but has a disk standard that wasn't proprietary to Sony. MO was big in Japan (bigger than Zip disk) but never seemed to get much traction in the west. NeXT used the 5.25" version of MO as the main storage for their machines, but it was the later 3.5" version that was more popular.

MO is the bottom-center disk in this photo https://kalleboo.com/linked/90s-disk-formats.jpeg

There is an even smaller version called UMD used by playstation portable.

And Hi-MD, Hi Density MiniDisc has a 1GB version.

I really wish there is a MiniDisc with 1 to 2 TB capacity.

I had a minidisc but never knew the actual MB capacity. Just you can get a CD on there. Id guess 100Mb? But the Zip drive also competed well in the space, I had one of those too!

You wouldn't believe it but it was:

Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Collaboration_and...

And also it was Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_CDP-101#Legacy

But also it was Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Music#1991%E2%80%932004:_...

And last but not least it was Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_technical_specific...

The author should really upload these to the Internet Archive.

The emulator (which seems like it's for DOS) seems a strange thing to include on the disc:

  ><fs> file /ddman.exe 
  MS-DOS executable, MZ for MS-DOS

TFA states they will do so once they receive the expected takedown notice from Sony.

I loved MiniDisc as a format and was an avoid user in the late 1999s before I transitioned to an iPod 3G in 2003 or something like that.

Anyway… that was a preamble… in 2001 I spotted some of these in a weird shop in London near Russel Square. They had a sticker price of £150 which I thought was absurd. In one of my very few attempts to haggle in my life, I offered £50 and the shop attendant turned me down flatly. I was mildly disappointed because they were so brazenly “alternate timeline cassette futurism” (before the latter term existed) and the thought that I’d missed a golden opportunity gnawed at me for years. At some point in 2002 or 2003 I went back, but the stock had gone. I doubt they sold any of them at that price in that age.

Anyway, I probably dodged a bullet. They looked cool though.

Like many other tech toys of the era, these had a much higher adoption and longer lifespan in Japan. The main use case was for dictionaries for Kanji practice for students.

The original Electronic Book format had many extensions: EB was Japanese-only, EBG added English, EBXA added PCM audio, EBXA-C added Chinese, and finally S-EBXA added color.

Looks like they were still selling a S-EBXA model in 2006: https://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/DD/Dd/index.html

Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.

I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.

The Sony MMCD[0] is a contemporary of the Sony Data Discman that people might also find of interest:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Multimedia_CD-ROM_Player

There are a couple of YouTube videos showing the device (filmed both around launch and more recently).

(I'll try to add some more context in a follow-up comment.)

----

[0] a.k.a. "Sony Bookman" a.k.a. "Sony Multimedia CD-ROM Player" a.k.a. "Sony PIX100" a.k.a. "Sony Corporation Programmable CD ROM Player".

I encountered the Sony MMCD when I fell down a rabbit hole *checks literal notes* around five years ago while researching Microsoft Encarta MindMaze[0] and its related file formats.

It turns out the data associated with MindMaze (& other encyclopedia data) changed storage format over subsequent releases of Encarta and these changes provide some interesting historical insights--including that if MS had had its way we'd all be writing web pages in RTF rather than HTML[1]. :D

You may ask, "What connection does this have to the Sony MMCD?".

Well, one of the storage formats used with early Encarta data is `.mvb` which is a format used by Microsoft Multimedia Viewer[2] (also known by multiple other names--none of which are any easier to web search :D ).

And, it turns out, "Multimedia Viewer could compile titles for Tandy Video Information System and other Modular Windows systems, as well as Sony Multimedia CD-ROM Player, a portable MS-DOS-based CD-ROM XA reader released in 1992."[2][3]

According to my research the tool "...includes software tools that simulate the look and feel of the Sony player titles on a PC" which is interesting in the context of the emulator for the Discman mentioned in the original post.

Anyway, that's the very short version of the rabbit hole--maybe in another five years I'll get around to writing up the rest...

Oh, just found my original tweet thread (including screenshots) about this rabbit hole as it happened[4]: https://xcancel.com/RancidBacon/status/1401009436949237763

----

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_MindMaze (New as of October 2025.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Multimedia_Viewer (First added some time after my ~2021 research.)

[3] The Tandy VIS being a "Modular Windows" system is also of historical interest and FWIW has some support in MAME.

[4] Including screenshots of "Modular Windows Shell" and various "Multimedia Viewer" versions running under WINE.

I actually love to get something like this as a dedicated Wikipedia device. Text only Wikipedia is 25.90 GB atm [0] so a dirt cheap 32GB microSD would be more than enough. Maybe an old ebook reader

0, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

You used to be able to have the entirety of Wikipedia on an iPod. Back when the entire text was 4gb.

But I mean considering Wikipedia pages are so small, and Internet so cheap. Why?

Internet censorship is more of a reality and a problem than it felt at the dawn of the age of cheap wireless broadband. I can certainly see the value in local wikipedia copies if internet blocks, age gates, etc need to be contended with.

One of those may be useful in say Iran RN.

That, with a quick local LLM, damn that'd be good!

You can run Kiwix [0] on a tablet with an offline copy of Wikipedia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix

Appears to use a Z80 CPU and shares some heritage with the SNES CD: https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17156

The killer app for the Data Discman would have been early (early 90s) use as a storage medium for digital cameras.

Huge lost opportunity for Sony.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com