Remember the mini disk it came before sony bough the film division, it was dead on arrival due to sonys high pricing and the inability to have digital outs as well as their proprietary atrac codec.
This isn't entirely accurate. First, MD was a tremendous hit in Japan and is still relatively popular over there. 2nd, I have the first model of MD player/recorder released in the US and not only did it have an optical digital out, it also had an optical digital in. 3rd, there's a lot of reasons why Sony would have used ATRAC, not least of which would have been the immaturity and high processing power required of MP3 during development of MD.
It could have replaced the aging floppy disks, but it did not. The 3.5 inch floppy disk was pretty much the last open standard they were able to get out of the door, since then it was vendor and user lockin.
It's definitely a shame that Sony wanted to protect their high end MO business so badly as well as remove possible music piracy through the computer. They could have been the Zip drive, only a couple of years earlier. That alone would have made the MD popular in the states. Well that and sane prices on the discs... they charged 3-5 times the cost of discs in the states compared to Japan.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
