Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there’s a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.
Just lost out to thumb drives and better Internet speeds.
I’m still salty minidiscs didn’t take off tho. 20 years ago an iPod cost the same as a mini disc player. But it only took 2 maybe 3 discs to surpass it’s storage. And you could even use a line in to dupe a CD if you wanted.
It wasn’t as fast as ripping, but the convenience factor was huge and compared to 56k Napster, didn’t really take that long.
I very nearly bought one back in the day. Instead I opted for an mp3 player with compact flash storage. I believe I was tired of my cd based walkman’s tendency to skip when I was moving so I wanted a smaller, non-moving drive.
Then my dumbass bought one of those compact flash drives with an internal platter harddrive.
My first MP3 player was a Creative Nomad MuVo 64MB, I was one of the first in my school with an MP3 player and since it also was a USB stick I was also one of the first with a USB drive in my school.
But it was nowhere near as sexy as the minidisc recorders and players were
Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there’s a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.
Zip drives made sense tho.
Just lost out to thumb drives and better Internet speeds.
I’m still salty minidiscs didn’t take off tho. 20 years ago an iPod cost the same as a mini disc player. But it only took 2 maybe 3 discs to surpass it’s storage. And you could even use a line in to dupe a CD if you wanted.
It wasn’t as fast as ripping, but the convenience factor was huge and compared to 56k Napster, didn’t really take that long.
Did minidiscs skip?
If you tried really hard it was supposed to be technically possible.
But I never had it happen
Minidiscs absolutely took off, the format was introduced back in 1992, and discontinued in 2013, that is more than two decades.
They were common in Europe and Japan, I sadly never had one during the height of popularity, but got two used ones back in 2014.
Minidisc is probably the most visualy attractive music format I know of, most players and recorders just look fantastic.
I very nearly bought one back in the day. Instead I opted for an mp3 player with compact flash storage. I believe I was tired of my cd based walkman’s tendency to skip when I was moving so I wanted a smaller, non-moving drive.
Then my dumbass bought one of those compact flash drives with an internal platter harddrive.
My first MP3 player was a Creative Nomad MuVo 64MB, I was one of the first in my school with an MP3 player and since it also was a USB stick I was also one of the first with a USB drive in my school.
But it was nowhere near as sexy as the minidisc recorders and players were
Which player would you have liked? abridged | full
If I got to pick one new recorder and one new player from the entire MD range…
Recorder: Either the MZ-NH1 or the MZ-RH1
Player: Either the MZ-E10, SJ-MJ7 or the DMC-Q55
Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.
The coolest thing about mini disc was how it looked like next-level spy shit in movies.
I’m pretty sure Zip lost out to CD-Rs and -RWs before the thumb drives and better Internet speeds showed up.
Also, I’m not salty at all about minidiscs because fuck Sony and all their proprietary formats.