Nilay Patel

From: warsaw@inc.net (Nilay Patel)
Subject: minidisc storage
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 23:29:46 -0500
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware.storage

recently while cleaning, i came across a minidisc i got in the mail (i don’t own a player) and a hammer at the same time. seizing the wild abandon of the moment, i set the disc on edge and whacked it with the hammer. the two halves of the shell fell apart, and inside lay the coolest little shiny cd-thing i’ve ever seen. the point-why didn’t sony just sell these things and ditch all that extraneous plastic? i urge you to try this at home. you or a friend probably has a minidisc but not a player. just crack the sucker open, and you’ll see what should have replaced the floppy, cd, and tape in one full swoop. instead, we have a little plastic jolly rancher-type piece of crap that no one uses because the price of all the plastic drives up the price of the minidisc format. there’s enough room on the unused side of the disc to hold relevant information (a disk label, a brand name) and a minidisc holds something like 400mb, i’m told. so here’s my idea. all that’s really needed to convert a make a million dollars is an adapter that converts regular old mindisc players to accept that little disc. to explain:

just imagine this-you insert a mindisc (shell and all) into a player. when you eject it, the shell pops out and opens exposing the disc inside. the disc has just basic information printed on the unused side, because, as sony’s driven in your ear a million times, the minidisc holds track names and whatnot on itself then to play a different minidisc (just the media this time) you pop it into the empty shell (now part of the machine-like a CD tray) and push the assembly back in.

there. i hope someone builds this little adapter.
i would buy one
warsaw@inc.net

Chris Ziegler and I were chatting today about how jaded some of our younger readers are towards technology companies, and I remarked that I was probably just as cynical back then. Here, then, is proof — a post I wrote on comp.sys.mac.hardware.storage decrying Sony’s mishandling of the MiniDisc. I was all of 15.

This was also the year I started dating a cheerleader, tasted booze for the first time, and joined my first band, so it appears 1996 was one of my more formative years.