[HN Gopher] Sony Data Discman
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Sony Data Discman
Author : naves
Score : 89 points
Date : 2026-01-25 08:23 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (huguesjohnson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (huguesjohnson.com)
| rwmj wrote:
| 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
| metadat wrote:
| TFA states they will do so once they receive the expected
| takedown notice from Sony.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| If memory serves, they have a notable mention in the Niven-
| Pournelle novel _Fallen Angels_.
| akaitea wrote:
| 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
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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!
| Twirrim wrote:
| 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
| rm445 wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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 ?) ..
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I was young at the time, but weren't zip drives and media
| much more expensive ?
| amelius wrote:
| I just wish pro-sumer LTO tape drives became a thing.
| garciansmith wrote:
| 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!)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| qubex wrote:
| 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 PS150 which I thought was absurd. In one of my very few
| attempts to haggle in my life, I offered PS50 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.
| haunter wrote:
| 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...
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| 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?
| ashleyn wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| That, with a quick local LLM, damn that'd be good!
| ashleyn wrote:
| Appears to use a Z80 CPU and shares some heritage with the SNES
| CD: https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=17156
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