[agumonkey]

I often wonder how things would have been if Sony had released MD as simple storage medium. It got out in 1992! Imagine having rewritable hundreds of megabytes at the time.

[pjc50]

They did, a little later (95?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data

It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.

[agumonkey]

Ha, I stand corrected, I never cared to investigate, and only remember the late 90s attempts.

This article says a little about the errors of splitting MD between audio and generic data http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm

Amazingly sad. Typical Sony ?

[pjc50]

Typical Sony. With a little help from the RIAA. They did it again with "memory stick". And UMD.

[agumonkey]

Yeah, even though the article gives plenty of additional data to explain how markets are weird beasts, Sony had so many failed attempts at bringing a new format ...