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.
Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..
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
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-DOSAnyway… 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.
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
* 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.)
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[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 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.
0, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...
Huge lost opportunity for Sony.