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The superdisk were what I wish had caught on. They could read HD floppies (though not any 2.88MB formats) and at some iteration were able to treat a single HD floppy as a 32MB(!!) tape drive.

IOMega seemed to have better marketing though.



I wish Sony had made a serious effort to make MiniDisc a data format. They did make data drives, but they were slow, expensive, and barely available.

140 MB data (in 1993!). Nearly infinite rewrites. Nature of the medium is that bit rot is almost impossible without direct physical damage. I enjoyed them in the twilight of their existence, just before MP3 players started to have reasonable storage capacities and prices (mine were/are all used). And the ones I recorded in 2002 still sound just fine if I play them today. It was a great replacement for cassettes; too bad it never caught on in the US.


FWIW Zip was only 1 year later with 100MB (and IMO less durable media). I agree that MD was better, but Sony in the 90s didn't seem to want to do anything that they couldn't completely own themselves.

My recollection is that Zip media was also way cheaper than blank MDs, but I don't have any sources for that.




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