this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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They vanished like everything in life that people had to suffer because there was no other choice: as soon as something better appeared, everybody ditched the hateful thing.
Then newer generations who didn't actually have to use the shit to do actual work revive it and called it vintage. Not for me: ZIP and JAZ drives are dead and they should stay dead. Good riddance.
A couple years ago on reddit I saw a post lamenting the death of....the minidisc.
Old portable storage tech sucked. Good riddance is right
Except for music. It is ok to mourn the loss of universal physical media for music.
Only if it's vinyl or CD. The only thing in the pro column for any tape format is the kachunk of the buttons
Not true. Cassettes were super fun to record with, and you can do lots of fun analog production tricks with them.
Mini cds were never common or universial. CDs where. So were cassettes and vinyl. There were a lot of niche formats. 8track got really close to common, I will say they didn't but someon should argue otherwise and you should consider their point.
mini cds are not minidiscs, this is a minidisc
minidisc is a magneto-optical format, cd is just an optical format
Huh I always called the mini CDs minidiscs and was wrong
Minidisc was insanely good technology; the problem was that it was crazy expensive proprietary tech. So almost no one used it, and never really took off.
But I loved mine.
Maybe it is cool but my point is that old storage tech offers no benefits to what we have now. It's not a bad thing when technology is superceded with zero compromise
It offered amazing benefits 30 years ago though. And the current tech you enjoy today was made possible thanks to what was developed years ago.
Sure but we don't live in 30 years ago. The Wright Flyer is a crappy airplane and sticks are crappy weapons, too.
It's funny because within the past year or so people are looking at Zip Drives like it was the second coming of storage, like this novelty "vintage" tech. but as someone who lived through that age and owned at least 3 or 4 drives myself they sucked. They broke constantly. Like I said I went through at least 3 of them. Once CD-R/RW drives became affordable there was no looking back. and then DVD-R drives were just so much better.
If at the time you were dependent on them for storage or backups it was a crap shoot. Sure you could backup your stuff but would you eventually be able to retrieve said backups if your drive went to hell? was it even worth it at that point? no.