Maximum MiniDisc with the Sony Vaio

[@tonygroenewoud-powell53]

A North American who not only used, but also owned MD! #respect :-) A Vaio with not just MD but also NetMD! WOW!

[@ssjaken]

Very cool vid! Never knew about this computer

[@miked4377]

thats a killer piece of tech...i would like to play with that unit right now! i would love to have that! cool multimedia system!

[@garthhowe297]

In Canada, I never heard of MD until about 6 years ago. Now I have a bunch of them, I think it is a great technology.

[@allanau]

Canadian here. It was never really advertise here but as a teenager in the 90’s I bought a few recorders.

[@Dr.Dawson]

Clint @LGR Will be so jealous. You have the speakers.

[@BilisNegra]

It was not this exact model, though, I think? I can't recall very well, but this design is not familiar to me.

[@Dr.Dawson]

@@BilisNegra No it wasn't but Clint didn't have the speakers and was bummed about it.

[@thomasjosephlamarque2927]

1:29 we lived in Boulder during the early 90s (UK citizen, back in the UK now). Made that occasional trip to Denver too.

[@f.k.b.16]

If i had money and saw a PC with a built in amp... I would have been all over it! My dad once had a great job in 1984 and bought a digital Curtis Mathis, J2572RG i think, that had its own built in amp for external stereo speakers! I would always brag on that TV (until it went kapoot 😭)

[@BilisNegra]

I think one of the niche use cases MiniDisc lived on after it disappeared from the consumer market is indeed radio broadcast, doing the duties tape carts used to do in them olden days.

[@deBaer]

During the mid 90s, it was quite common for university PC pools to have built-in MD drives in all the machines, but this had nothing to with audio. Students kept their data, graphs, papers and presentations on data MDs so they could use them on any device when networks tended to be slow and network storage very restricted. Like floppy discs, but with 100 times the capacity.

[@honestguy7764]

Those were not minidiscs, but zip discs

[@deBaer]

@@honestguy7764 You're funny. ;-) No, I've seen the MD data drives myself when visiting universities in California in 1995. The MD data discs are smaller than ZIP discs, they fit 40% more data and the drives are more reliable than the ZIP drive that is often plagued by the click of death. The drives I saw must have been Sony MDM-111.

[@fattomandeibu]

My brother had a Minidisc player what he used when working as a rural gardener, he'd spend his nights putting together the next day's mix discs by plugging it into the AUX out on our hi-fi and recording from his massive CD collection in preparation for going to work the next day. He'd've probably loved a PC like this, but again, would've likely been out of his price range. One warning, though: Pentium 4s are notoriously hot CPUs when running at 100% usage, might be a good idea not to run anything that might push the CPU too hard when combined with that amp.

[@zeus.edwards2662]

this is so dope !!!!! i got a lot of md's but use the player to record using platium md...Still prefer md over cd simply because of the protection, and the size. If sony was to revive mini disc in the future I'm sure it would be able to hold a ridiculous amount of stuff... 3d optical disc with lots of storage... that would be awesome.

[@Renville80]

Very interesting... it would have been nice to see what all was inside the tower, however. :)

[@loveaviation]

I would love to have a MD drive for a modern computer. I have so many MDs that I recorded with my portable recorder that I have not been able to make digital backups of into mp3s.

[@Chagen_Seven]

Interesting video, thanks:)

[@Uniblab8]

I have a whole bunch of Mini CDs and I can't figure out a use for them these days

[@riseandshinejp]

It was popular in Japan and has it's own data format.

[@gentuxable]

At the time when MiniDisc was out I thought it would take over as a universal storage media also for data because Floppies were small and slow, CDs were large and complicated to burn onto (either making new sessions or use packet writing and hope it is compatible with you peer which was almost guaranteed not to be), flash and external drives were very expensive and USB at the time unreliable and only 12 Mbit/s. MiniDisc could‘ve been a neat sharing/backup solution if drives were available more affordably, but Sony claimed exclusivity and thus failed.

[@keyboard_g]

I agree that iconography is rather boring these days.

[@Capturing-Memories]

Yes, GUI design degraded over the years for all manufacturers mainly Sony and Apple, You would think if processors got faster the graphics get more creative, but nope, Not sure why, maybe the new generation don't like that kind of realistic designs.