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Sony Data Discman

107 points by naves

by giantrobot

2 subcomments

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.

by agumonkey

8 subcomments

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 ?) ..

by Twirrim

0 subcomment

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

by rwmj

1 subcomments

by qubex

0 subcomment

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.

by kalleboo

0 subcomment

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

by follower

1 subcomments

by rm445

0 subcomment

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.

by haunter

3 subcomments

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...

by DrNosferatu

0 subcomment

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.

by ashleyn

0 subcomment

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