Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Weirdest Disks Ever”.
This thing is actually pretty darn close to being a CD well, not in the sense that it’s a standard compact disc, but it does use freaking laser beams to save data. We’Re going to look at some really weird Optical discs today, starting with the floptical disc, and in case you don’t know what optical disc means. It’S just a CD or anything similar that uses lasers to read or write like a DVD, an old GameCube disk, or these really big laser discs. You might have used back in school. The idea behind the floptical disc was to take a standard three and a half inch floppy, remember those they weren’t actually floppy and then sharply increases capacity, while a regular floppy disk could only hold about 1.44 megabytes in typical PC format. The floptical held almost 21., even though the actual data on the drive was stored.
Magnetically, similar to a plain old floppy disk floppedical used lasers to stabilize the read and write heads the little part that almost contacts the disc and actually writes and retrieves data. This allowed the head to be much more precise, meaning that there’s much more data that could accurately be written to the disk per unit of area. But if floptical delivered more storage in this same package, why does it remain such an obscure piece of tech? Well, it originally came out in 1991 and by that point the standard 1.44 megabyte floppy Drive was already very ingrained in the PC market and while there was demand for higher capacity, removable storage, floptical was very delicate and just not reliable enough to straight up. Replace standard drives. It also didn’t help that iomega came out with their zip drives in 1994, which held at least 100 megabytes and were much faster than floptical drives and, of course, floptical didn’t have any chance of competing against rewritable CDs once they became popular in the late 90s. Let’S talk about this thing looks like a regular CD, but it’s actually a CD plus G, the G standing for graphics, but these weren’t Graphics in the sense of like a full length. Video you’d, get with something like a DVD movie.
Cd plus G was actually introduced back in 1985 and used blank space in the original CD audio format to encode simple graphics. Some of these were images that were included as a promotional bonus with certain music albums, but more commonly CD plus G was used for karaoke machines, since showing lyrics on a decorative background. Image didn’t exactly take up a lot of space.
Cd plus G quickly became a standard for amateur singers on Margarita night the world over, although they didn’t see much use outside of karaoke. A few game consoles like the Sega CD and Sega Saturn, and later even the Sega Dreamcast, as well as some home dvd players. Could read CD plus G discs? You can actually still get CD plus G karaoke machines today and some Standalone albums that made use of the tech are now sought after by collectors. But while CD plus G had its day, we’re going to talk about a format that one huge company sunk tons of money into, but had a short lifespan right after we thank grammarly for sponsoring this video grammarly is here to help you get your work done and Be more productive, it provides comprehensive, spelling and grammar suggestions to ensure your writing is professional. Mistake, free and Polished simply install the free, desktop top app log in and start typing, there’s also grammarly premium, which provides more in-depth feedback on your writing, such as tone adjustments that make you sound more confident and ensure that you’re coming across the way you want to.
There’S even a premium full sentence, rewrite feature that helps you rephrase hard to read: sentences for clarity, go to gremlin.com techquickie, to sign up for a free account and get 20 off grammarly premium. Today, I’m sure you remember Sony’s PSP Playstation Portable, which is an absolute beast. When it first released back in 2004., its Graphics put the competing Nintendo DS to shame, partly due to the universal media, disc, those little guys that were about the size of a cookie. Despite its diminutive size, the UMD could actually hold up to 1.8 gigabytes of data, meaning not only more detailed games but also the ability to hold full length movies. That would actually look good, especially on the PSP small display, and indeed hundreds of Hollywood.
Blockbusters came out on UMD, along with music videos from big name acts, well-known TV series and even porn. If you lived in Japan, how always a crowd pleaser, even if it is blurred, but these days UMD has disappeared from the market completely, even though it’s still easy to find CDs and Blu-rays for sale. Why well Sony designed the UMD as a proprietary format? It was a kind of a follow-up to the mini disc back in the day, meaning that no device, except for the PSP, could actually use the disks.
Although watching movies and shows on the PSP was undoubtedly convenient watching a movie on the go for most people at the time meant popping in a regular DVD into their laptop meaning. There wasn’t much of a market for UMD video, especially considering their high price. This meant that, even though the PSP was a successful console, not many people were buying umds for anything other than PSP games and by the time the PSP reached end of life streaming. Video on smartphones was really starting to take off, meaning that Sony didn’t really see a need to come out with a lineup of movies on physical meteonic successor, the PS Vita.
Of course, if you really missed those little discs, mini Blu-ray is actually a thing, but seeing as we’re out of time, let us know down in the comments if you’d like to see another video on more weird discs of the past. Thanks for watching guys like dislike check out some of our other videos comment with video suggestions down below and don’t forget to subscribe and follow. .