Episode: 2212
Title: HPR2212: meanderings Cyberpunk and the Minidisc
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2212/hpr2212.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:46:50

---

This in HPR episode 2,212 entitled, The Underings, Cyberpunk and the Milidisk.
It is posted back when Mo and in about 5 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is the Cyberpunk history of the Sony Milidisk.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Anasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Get your web hosting that's honest and fair at AnAnasthost.com.
Hello, this is Kuvmo.
This is going to start off in the weeds, but I wish to get a timeline laid down.
Somewhere around 1982, when the CD came out, I saw a little film called Tron.
This got me fascinated with computers and had to beg a junior high teacher to let me
take his basic programming class.
He thought my mask goes would keep me from getting out of it, but it flowed like water.
Later a TRS-80 color sound kept the interest alive.
I was reading a lot of fantasy and plain dungeons dragons on a regular basis, so quite a few
choose your own adventure and dice rolling programs were written and copied to the tape
deck.
Of course, a few years later, girls and cars took center stage and it wasn't until 91
that a new job working for a semiconductor plant reintroduced me to a terminal, mainly
a VAC system that I loved throwing commands at just to see what would turn up.
Eventually the VACs moved on to PCs and we had access to use net.
I had time to read books while waiting for the machines I was working with to need attention.
This led to an eventual dive into Cyberpunk.
Of course I loved Blade Runner from Way Back, but had not realized that it belonged
to a complete genre, burning chrome, the sprawl trilogy, snow crash.
I could not help make the connection to my life spending the weekends talking with shady
characters in less than ideal locations to find parts for hot rods I could afford.
And then during the week, in a bunny suit, striding the halls of a bright white cleanroom
building the tech that was taking over the world.
The transition from cassette tapes to CDE in my peer group was slow and it was probably
laid into the 90s before the cassettes were finally boxed up and shelved.
Personal audio players using flash and hard drives were hitting the market, Rios, iPods,
CD players it would play MP3s.
This was all I heard about and jumped into the MP3 craze with an iPod.
In 99, the Matrix came out and I loved it, but the scene in the beginning struck me.
Neo was selling illicit program sneakernet style on what looked like a real world disc.
After some research, I learned of the Sony mini-disc.
It had come out in 92 and was far superior to the cassette and was set to be a driving
force in personal music before the CD could mature.
Unfortunately, while being very popular in Japan, uptake in the West was weak.
The introduction of affordable, recordable CDs in 96, coupled with the 98 introduction
of all those personal audio players, signaled a slow, lingering death for the mini-disc.
Short introduction from Wikipedia.
The mini-disc MD is a magneto-optical, disk-based data storage device, offering a capacity
of 74 minutes and later any 80 minutes, have digitized audio or 1GB of high MD data.
The Sony brand audio players were on the market from September 1992 until March 2013.
Mini-disc was announced by Sony in September 1992 and released that November for sale
in Japan and in December in Europe, Canada, the USA and other countries.
The music format originally based exclusively on ATRAC or ATRAC audio data compression,
but the option of linear PCM digital recording was later introduced to attain audio quality
comparable to that of a compact disk.
Mini-disc were very popular in Japan but made a limited impact elsewhere.
Sony announced they would cease development of MD devices with the last of the player sold
by March 2013 and Wiki.
Due to the mini-disc's near obscurity in the West and its cool form factor, it has been
used in many cyberpunk settings, demolition man in 93, strange days, and Johnny Namanik
in 95, Nirvana in 97, and of course the Matrix in 99.
A recent tingle of interest sent me scouring eBay and thrish shops yielding mini-units
and disks available at many different price points.
Unfortunately, Sony no longer provides the needed software and great sites like mini-disc.org
have been asked to quit hosting it.
There are some open source projects such as QHIMD transfer, which is in the Linux repos,
but as of the time of this writing I have been able to connect to the Sony MZN505 Type
R.
If any of you are still using your players and have tips on keeping this format alive,
comment, email, or make your own episode going into more detail.
I will have links in the show notes.
Have a wonderful 2017.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find
out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dot org and the infonomicom computer club
and is part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on
the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
On this otherwise stated, today's show is released on the create of comments, attribution,
share a like, 3.0 license.
