Ever since man figured out written language,
we’ve been finding more and more efficient ways of storing information on different types
of media. In this episode I’m going to be showing
you a whole bunch of rare and bizarre media types. Now, I have a lot of them to cover
so I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on any one particular media. But, I have
separated it up into three different categories. For example, I’m going to have category
on mechanical media, so this is media that requires something physically to touch and
move in order to read the information. And of course, I’m going to cover magnetic media,
which of course works with magnets to read the information. And then I’ll move into
optical media, which uses lasers typically to read the media. Now, I won’t really be
talking about any modern flash memory or anything like that. But also, because there are so
many of these, I’m going to put a little bit of a table of contents down in the description
field, so if there’s a particular type of media you want to look for, you can find out
exactly what time stamp to go to to see that kind of media. So, let’s get started. We’ll start with one of the oldest media
types, an Edison cylinder. While, based on the original wax cylinder, this is a slightly
newer design that is made of plastic, and was probably made in the very early 1900s,
which means it is still over 100 years old. These hold around 4 minutes of audio. The
inside appears to be a thick cardboard or wood of some kind. Here’s a little closer
look at the grooves. Oh, and the actual artist or song name was printed here on the edge
so you could read it if these were stacked on a shelf. Now for something just a bit more modern.
This is a long-play microgroove record. This was sort of revolutionary as it would hold
over 20 minutes of decent sounding audio per side. This came out in the 1940s. And here’s something interesting for you.
3 channel stereophonic high fidelity by Motorola. I’m not quite sure how it works, but I think
you need a special Motorola record player to be able to use it. I think this came out
in the 1960s. And here’s something from a little earlier.
This is a victrola record, but it is just single sided, which is apparently somewhat
rare. Notice that this one is just completely smooth and flat on the back. Apparently, this
made them prone to cracking, so later on they started stamping the Victor logo on the back
of them. And this is just a pattern to make it stronger. Later on, they started putting
content on both sides of the disc. Next we have an Edison diamond disc. These
came out around 1912 and were meant to compete with the Victor standard, But instead of the
phonograph needle moving side to side, the diamond disk has the grooves designed so the
needle moves up and down, much like in the cylinders. One really noticeable thing about
these is that they are very thick, and kind of heavy as compared to other records of the
era. OK, so what I have here is a 16 inch vinyl
record. And just as a size comparison, here’s a 12 inch. And, yeah, you can see how much
bigger they are. So, you might ask, what on earth kind of player would you even play something
like this in? Well, They were actually used by radio stations. A lot of the material was
sent to radio stations to be played over the air on these big 16 inch vinyl records because
they could hold a lot of audio. So, yeah if you were listening to the radio back in the
1930s or 40s, you might very well have been listening to the radio off of one of these.
So the radio stations had their own proprietary players to play these discs. This particular one is apparently full of
radio commercials for Winston cigarettes. And this one here is from the United Nations
and is called Jungle Story. Flip around to the back and there’s something called “Blood
Brothers.” And here’s another sort of mechanical contact
media. These are punch cards. Believe it or not this format dates back to the 1920s before
computers, as a way to control certain mechanical devices. But, the widest use was certainly
in early computer storage. But, this was later replaced by punch tape.
This is designed for binary storage, with 9 bits of data, one for parity checking, and
could come in large rolls to store larger computer programs. The smaller little holes
down the middle were used for feeding and keeping track of which row of bits were being
read. And since we’re talking about computers
now, this is the last mechanical media I’m going to show. This was a computer magazine
and it was printed in 1978. It contains lots of advertising and articles about computers
of the era, mostly Apple II stuff. But what’s interesting is when you get to the middle
here, there is a little flexible record. This is called The Floppy ROM and apparently it
contains several Apple II programs written in BASIC. This was designed to play in your
record player and you could connect it to the cassette input on the back of your Apple
II and load just like it was from a cassette. It looks like there are at least 7 different
programs on this side, plus maybe 3 more on the back side. I’ve never actually tried
this, but if enough people are interested, I might do a video on this product! But, time
to move on to magnetic media! To get started, I have here an unopened box
of 8 inch floppy disks and two unusual boxes of 5 and a quarter inch floppy discs, which
I’m going to unbox. I’ll start with the 8 inch box here. Ohh.. I smell 1980s air in
there! Heck, that might even be 1970s air! Anyway, so here are the large, original floppy
disks. These are the same kind of disks that were used in the movie WarGames. Now, let’s open these 5 and a quarter inch
disks. I said they were unusual, but that’s only partially true. These are 500 K floppy
disks. See, it says so right on the label. But they are also double-sided, double density
which means they are actually just regular 360K floppy disks. They are just showing the
raw, unformatted capacity on the label, which was an unusual and somewhat deceiving practice.
So, other than the label, there is nothing unusual about these. These disks, on the other hand, do have something
different about them. These are called hard-sectored disks. But what makes them different? Well,
they, look exactly the same. In fact, looking at it next to the normal disks, there is nothing
different to see. But the difference is somewhat hidden from view. So, to show you what is
different, I’ll show you a dirty trick for removing the media from these without using
any cutting tools. Of course, if you ever do this, don’t expect the disk to ever read
again. And now, I’ll pull out the hard sectored media. Do you see the difference now? Yep,
the regular disk has one hole for a single rotation. But the hard sectored disk has a
hole for each sector so the drive is always aware of when a new sector begins. And although these look ordinary as well,
these are a bit rare. These are the quad-density disks needed by some high capacity drives
used back in the early 1980s, like the Commodore 8050 and others. Moving along, this is an Apple Fileware disk,
sometimes called a Twiggy disk. These were used in the original Apple Lisa, and were
intended to be used in the Macintosh, but never were. Notice it has two areas for reading
the disk. That’s because the read heads were on opposite sides of the disk, with a
foam pad on the opposite side from the read head. Other than the weird shape, these are
similar in design to a 1.2 Megabyte high density floppy, in fact it is possible to modify a
1.2 megabyte disk to work in a twiggy drive. As you can see, it is the same dimensions
as a regular floppy. This is a IBM prototype called the Demidiskette.
Apparently it is read diagonally from the corner, which is weird. And just for size
comparison, here’s a regular 5 and a quarter inch floppy disk. The final product actually
has a hard shell like this, but it was never sold commercially. Here’s an interesting one. This is a 3 and
a quarter inch flex diskette. What makes this interesting is it is like a hybrid of the
two most popular disk types. It’s in a flexible jacket like the older style disks, but it
is smaller and uses a metal ring on the spindle like later style disks. Here it is compared
to a regular floppy. And compared to a 3 and a half. These were originally designed to
compete with the Sony 3 and a Half inch disk, but virtually nobody used them. Here’s another little tiny disk. This was
used in some proprietary Brother sewing and embroidery machines. This is a TEC floppy disk. Again, I have no
idea what it goes to. This one is also read from the corner. And here it is compared to
a normal disk. And here is an Amsoft CF-2. These are hard
plastic disks. They are really stiff. And they are a bit of an odd shape, as they are
sort of elongated. Here it is next to a 5 and a quarter. It’s closer in size to a
3 and a half. Here’s the write protect switch. And also, the disk material looks metallic,
which is weird. Moving along, this is an MCD cassette. Now,
don’t be fooled, this isn’t a tape, it’s a disk, even though it is really thick and
heavy feeling. Here it is compared to a regular floppy. You can see how much thicker it is.
And just in case you need proof that this is a disk and not a tape, I’ll open the
little door here. No idea what these were used for, though. OK, so here’s something really cool. These
two inch disks were used to store single NTSC frames of video in an analog format. There
are 50 tracks and each track stores one field. So you could store 25 complete frames on each
disk. These were used in the original Sony Mavica camera, along with medical and industrial
equipment as a means to capture single photos from endoscopes and other things. Here it
is compared to a regular floppy. Here’s a similar type floppy disk, but is
not compatible. It was only used by the Zenith minisport laptop and they could hold 793 kilobytes
of data per disk, which was pretty cool at the time, but these disks never gained any
market share. This one is called IT media. And while you
may be tempted to say it’s 1.44 megabytes, it’s actually missing the decimal point,
so it is 144 megabytes, 100 times what a similar sized floppy would store. This was a failed
competitor to the iOmega Zip disk, and the LS-120 super floppy, which I don’t consider
either of these rare but if I didn’t show them I’m get hounded with emails. So here
you go. This is the LS-120, which could store 120 megabytes per disk and the drives were
backwards compatible with floppies. This was actually my favorite successor to the floppy
drive, but actually never caught on that much. Here it is compared with a regular floppy.
And of course the Zip disk, This one is 250 megabytes, but they came in other sizes. These
had a few years of great success, but were killed off by recordable CDs. Here’s another very hyped, but failed disk
format. This is the Iomega Click disk. These came out in the late 1990s and held 40 megabytes
of data. They were intended for digital cameras and portable MP3 players, but with the price
drop of flash memory, they couldn’t compete by the time they came to market. They also
made a little PCMCIA card for your laptop that was a tiny little drive that could read
and write to these like this. So, pretty neat. And I think had flash media not became more
affordable, these would have probably been a huge success. Ok, let’s move on to tape media. This is
one of those reel to reel computer tapes, like the ones you might have seen in WarGames.
This format dates back to the 1950s and believe it or not they were still in use by some companies
all the way up to around the year 2000. Now, you would have to load these into a very similar
machine as would be used for reel to reel audio tapes, or motion pictures, where they
would spool onto another reel during use. And here’s another brand, this one by 3M.
This one opens a little different. For this one, you lift here, and then the outer protective
ring comes off. These probably took less room to store. Speaking of reels. I guess I’ll need to
show some audio reels, even though these aren’t really that uncommon. There were many different
sizes. If you want to know more about these, Techmoan has done numerous videos on the format.
This particular one is a motion picture soundtrack to the movie Mondo Cane. And here’s a smaller
spool for home recording. OK, let’s have a look at some video cassettes.
This type of cassette is known as U-Matic. It was used for broadcast material as it had
a higher resolution than VHS. This one says I.R.S. on it. I’m not sure if this is some
kind of band, or some kind of documentary about the internal revenue service. Anyway,
these tapes were used in TV stations to broadcast regular content. Now, this one is even more interesting. It
says A-Team sales presentation. So, what this was, essentially, was a sales pitch of the
TV show the A-Team, which was sent out to TV stations trying to get them to buy the
show. I’d love to get a U-Matic player and have a look at what is on here. Maybe we’ll
do that in a future episode. Notice that the spindles don’t look anything like VHS either
as there is no gear-like grooves. Here’s some history for you. This appears
to be a VHS version of the Shining. In fact, it even says VHS right there. But, if you
open it up, you’ll find it’s actually a beta-max tape. So, during the decline of
beta-max, they would reuse the same VHS cases to save money, but the shrink-wrap would have
a sticker on it saying it was betamax. But yeah, this is an ordinary beta-max tape. Here
it is compared to a VHS tape. But now, I need to show you the KING of cassettes. So, do you remember that scene from the movie
Crocodile Dundee? It goes something like this. That’s not a knife. That’s a knife. So,
yeah, a good analogy for that would be for someone to hold up a cassette like this and
say “I’ve got a cassette.” And then you would say “well that’s not a cassette.
This is a cassette! So yeah, this mammoth cassette comes in its own little suitcase
carrying case. Let’s open this thing up! This is the Sony SD1 cassette. It is the biggest
cassette I’ve ever seen. This thing is huge! Yeah, now that’s what I call a cassette! Other than it is called the Sony SD-1, that’s
about all I know about it. I haven’t been able to find much of any information as to
what this giant cassette was actually used for. Although I do know it stored digital
information, since it is written right on the cassette. Just for size comparison, here
is a traditional audio cassette. And even a traditional video cassette is small by comparison.
This appears to be the write-protect option. But yeah, I don’t know if this was for digital
video, or just data storage. This next cassette here is definitely meant
for digital video. Now, this cassette is still large, but not nearly as large as the last.
One interesting thing is you can designate 4 or 8 channel by turning this little screw.
I assume that is the number of audio channels. And here is is compared to a regular VHS cassette.
These were used for storing high definition video back in the 1990s, probably in actual
digital camcorders. Moving along, this one is a a bit of an oddity.
It’s the Video 120 cassette from 1975. It has this little tag handing here saying to
“remove shipping blocks before use.” There are actually two independent spindles here
that can be moved because the spools are actually on top of each other, presumably moving in
opposite directions. Also, it inserts at this end, so that means you would load it this
direction. Anyway, this was a failed home video format. And here where it says do not
open, well…I’ll open it anyway. Yep, there’s the tape. Here’s something neat. This is an ADAT digital
mastering audio cassette. It holds 42 minutes of audio. And if you think it looks like a
VHS cassette, you aren’t crazy. That’s basically exactly what it is. It is for the
Alesis ADAT 8-track audio recorder, which was designed to use VHS video cassettes. But,
some companies like Ampex made special high quality cassettes marketed for use with these
machines. And here it is next to a regular VHS, as you can see, it is identical. THIS… Is a movie on 8mm video cassette.
Which, is a bit unusual because movies were never really distributed on 8mm format. Which
is unfortunate since it was a higher quality format and the tapes were definitely smaller
than VHS. Unfortunately, in this case I’m missing the actual cassette, but needless
to say it looks like an ordinary 8mm cassette with an Indiana Jones label on it. These were
most likely sold to airlines as they used these cassettes for onboard movies throughout
most of the 90s since the tapes and the players were much smaller and lighter than regular
VCRs. I’ve shown you huge cassettes, now it’s
time to look at a really tiny one. This is a Datasonix cassette. These were actually
digital backup tapes for use with computers. LGR did an in-depth episode and demonstration
on these. Here it is compared with a regular audio cassette. And this is a MicroMV video cassette. These
were used in some digital camcorders starting in 2001, and was discontinued in 2006 after
being considered a market failure. These held 60 minutes of video stored in an MPEG2 data
stream. Since it is a video cassette, let’s compare with VHS. Although Mini-DV is a better
comparison, as it was the real competition for this format. This is an 8mm data cassette. It looks identical
to an 8mm video cassette, and it more or less is. The main difference is just the labeling,
and the intended use, which is for data backup storage. This one is far more interesting. This is
another data cassette, which stores 600 MB. It has a surprising weight to it. But, you
can see it is roughly the same shape as a traditional audio cassette. But, I am not
entirely sure what these were used for. And this is a Micro Video Cassette from 1980.
You might say this is a predecessor to the 8mm video cassette, as it was marketed towards
the same goal, but never saw much use outside of Japan. And here it is next to an 8mm for
size comparison. Here we have a DCC, or Digital Compact Cassette.
This has been covered a lot by Techmoan. This particular cassette is a blank cassette, meant
for home recording. This is one format I wish had gained more popularity. And maybe it would
have had it come out a few years earlier. It has a little protective sleeve here. But
otherwise, this is the same dimensions as a regular compact cassette. This was done
so that players could be made backwards compatible with the analog cassettes of the time. As
you can see all of the holes line up too. Moving backwards in time a bit, here is an
8-Track cassette. Of course 8-Tracks aren’t rare, so, the only thing interesting about
this particular tape is that it is a blank cassette, meant to be recorded on. The vast
majority of 8-Tracks were pre-recorded from the factory. Admittedly, the 8-Track is an
inherently bad design and one that I’m not sad to see go away! Here’s something very similar to an 8-Track.
This tiny little thing is a special cassette used in some Sinclair microcomputers, called
a ZX Microdrive. And the reason it is similar to an 8-track is because it is a continuous
spool design that just keeps going around and around. These could hold about 85 kilobytes
of data. And here’s a similar technology that was
tried on the market, called a Stringy floppy. And this one looks quite stringy indeed. One
problem with this is because the tape is moved entirely by the capstan, there is no way to
spool the tape back inside if it comes out like this. There aren’t even any screws
to take it apart. Anyway, probably best that these didn’t succeed either! Of course, talking about magnetic formats,
there are dozens of different home-backup solutions that came out, and because they
were meant to be used for backup, interchangeability with other people wasn’t that important,
so this meant a lot of proprietary formats were created. And frankly, there are just
too many to show, but I’ll show a few interesting ones. This is an iOmega Ditto cartridge, which
is tape based. But this is a Syquest cartridge, which is a hard disk platter inside. And this
is kind of a weird one. It’s a really long cartridge, and it inserts into the machine
like this. And here’s one you might not have heard of before, the iOmega REV disk.
These came in neat little cartridges like this and opening it up here, you can see it
is also a hard disk platter of some sort inside. And of course, there are numerous professional
backup devices as well, and some of these overlapped with the consumer market, so there
isn’t always an obvious dividing line here. This is a DDS cassette. But one I find more
interesting are the DLT and LTO tapes. They only have a single spool inside, which means
the cartridges take up less space, and then when they are placed inside the machine, it
will grab the end of the spool and attach it to another spool inside the machine. When
it is done, it rewinds the spool back inside the cartridge and ejects it. I guess this classifies as optical media,
right? This is an old roll of film used in classrooms. This one is called “discovering
the library.” The interesting thing is, you can see this was last used in 1997, which
surprises me. I was in elementary school during the early 1980s the last time I saw a film
projector used in a classroom. Nevertheless, let’s open this up and have a look at it.
So here’s the leader, and you’d need to run this threw the projector and then attach
it to another spool to collect it. Now, it appears this film also has an audio track
stored on it as well. Which for me, brings back memories of terrible sounding audio,
from a half-blown out speaker, in a brick classroom with a horrible echo. And thus,
this is a format I really don’t miss. And what we have here is something similar.
This is an actual cartoon that was sold on film for consumers to buy and play on their
own projectors. I’m not really sure what decade these were made in, though. I don’t
even think these have sound, either. So, not entirely optical, I have a few magneto-optical
disks to show first, starting with this, the MO disc. These store 1.3 gigabytes per disc.
They are just about identical in size to a regular floppy disk. Of course, it might be
best to compare with another magneto-optical format, the minidisc. So, yeah, it’s a little
bit bigger than a minidisc, although it does hold more data. And here’s another competitor to the floppy
disk, this is known as the Floptical Disk. They hold 21 megabytes of data, and as you
can see the are identical in shape and size. I think the drives were backwards compatible
with regular floppies. Next up is the data play disc. These tiny
optical disks hold 500 megabytes, or 250 megabytes per side. Techmoan also did a good video covering
these in detail, for those interested. This is another format that I think deserved to
succeed, but just didn’t make it. Next up is the Sanyo ID photo disk. As you
can see it holds 730 megabytes of data. I think these were being aimed at digital cameras
and the like, but never really caught on. They are basically just a tiny little compact
disk in there, much like a data play disc. OK, and while everyone is familiar with optical
discs, I bet most of you have never seen optical discs this big. These are giant optical disk
cartridges. This one holds 6.8 gigabytes. And, I don’t even know what kind of disc
is in there. These are just a little bit smaller. Smaller is a relative term here. I think these
might have been used for video. Some of these are possibly WORM discs, cause its write-once,
read-many that were used in archival storage. This looks like something that, yeah, was
probably more likely used in like a data center of some kind. And this one here is actually
still brand new in the box. So, let’s open this thing up. This is something else. I’ve
never seen anything like this before. This is a Philips laser magnetic storage? I’ve actually not been able to find out
much of anything about this format. It has shutters on each side like this. Definitely
looks like a 12” sized disc in there, much like a laserdisc. Maybe somebody can shed
some light in the comments. But this one, I think, is is probably the
most interesting. It actually comes with it’s own little carry case. That’s actually like
really cool. Let’s take a look at this thing. I haven’t been able to find out much about
this either, other than it is a WORM disc, so you can only write to it one time. Apparently
it is also CAV, or constant angular velocity, so it has the same amount of data on the inner
tracks as the outer. Now, if you try to open this cover by hand, it won’t budge. But
if you grab this little slider on the side, it will open up for us. And looking at these
lines, we can definitely confirm that it is hard sectored and CAV, just as it said it
was. They also have two write protect notches,
one for each side. And they are pretty serious about making sure you don’t move them by
accident, since it requires poking something down in this hole to release the switch in
either direction. And here’s another that is kind of similar.
This is also a write-once media, called LM4000. It also opens from the side. And you can actually
move this one too. OK, so here’s one for you. This is a PD
Disc. PD stands for phase-change dual. It’s a re-writable optical technology based on
the regular compact disc dimensions and capacity. Introduced in 1995, they hold 650 Megabytes.
I used to use these a lot back in the day, and I guess I must have been the only one
because I haven’t met anyone else that used them. I found them much more reliable than
regular CD-R. These are hard sectored, as you can see. And you can tell they are CLV
because there are more sectors on the outer part than on the inner part. They have a little
notch up here you can move to write-protect the disc. And, I also happen to have a PD drive here
to show you. So, this is just an ordinary sized optical drive that you would mount in
a PC. This particular one is IDE interface. And when opened, it has a little tray like
this. And the cartridge fits down in here like so. Pretty simple. Of course, the drive
was also designed to be able to read regular CD audio and CD-ROM discs as well. And they
just fit right in there like so. Now, in case you are wondering what these little clips
are for, I’ll show you. If your optical drive was mounted on its side. Or your computer
were on it’s side, these clips were designed to help you load regular CDs without them
falling out, like so. So, that’s PD media. Now, if you haven’t
heard of it before, you may have possibly heard of it’s successor, called DVD-RAM,
which came out in 1997. This was also a type of phase-change disc, but using higher density.
The cartridges are almost identical, and in fact most DVD-RAM drives were backwards compatible
with PD media so they could use either one. As you can see, the DVD-RAM is also hard-sectored.
But one interesting thing, the cartridge says it is 5.2 GB, but it doesn’t work exactly
like you might think. This cartridge is double-sided, with a side A and B. It’s sort of reminiscent
of old floppy disks in that regard. In fact, it has two write-protect notches, one for
each side. So, really, each side of the cartridge has only 2.6 gigabytes. Which, is still a
lot more than the PD media had. A competing format was NEC’s MVDisc, which
was a market failure. But it also looks very similar and holds 5.2 GB. But it is not compatible
with DVD-RAM. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about this format. Of course, I do need
to mention that DVD-RAM did get an upgrade to these 9.4 GB versions. Now, there’s a
few interesting things about these. Same cartridge dimensions. And drives that used these were
also backward compatible with the previous media as well. But they do have one unusual
feature. The cartridges were designed to open up, if you press in just the right place.
And the reason is because some other types of DVD drives were becoming compatible with
DVD-RAM but didn’t use the cartridge. So this made the discs compatible between drives
that did or did not use the cartridge. Of course, being these were considered a professional
format, keeping them in the cartridge was ideal for protecting them. Most of you are probably at least familiar
with laserdiscs. They came on these huge 12 inch discs, the size of vinyl records. I find
these interesting because these things actually record analog data on an optical disc. Laserdiscs
are generally two sided and the way they are made is by sandwiching two discs together
with a layer of adhesive in the middle. Each side holds about an hour of video, so two
hours for a single disc. However, let me show you some more obscure
laserdiscs types. So this is a music video single. This is by no means one of my favorite
artists, but I found this in a thrift store years ago and bought it because 8” laserdiscs
are so rare. So, basically it’s the same concept just on a smaller disc and can only
hold about 20 minutes of video, and this particular version is single sided, so it is the same
thickness as a regular compact disc. So, holding it in your hands feels a lot like holding
an oversized music CD. But here’s something even more rare. This
is called CD Video. And this disc is a hybrid between laserdisc and a music CD. If you’ll
notice there are 4 audio tracks on this, that any regular CD player could play, but then
track 5 is a music video, slightly under 3 minutes. The video portion is playable on
a laserdisc player. And if you look at the disc you can actually see two different rings
of data because the analog video data looks different on the disc surface than digital
audio. This was supposed to be how music singles would be released on laserdisc, but for some
reason the concept never took off, and these are really rare today. But then, what I have here is even more obscure.
This says CD video, but I’m not sure what makes it a CD-Video exactly, because it is
on an 8 inch disc, and is also double sided. So it would never fit in a CD player of any
kind, thus requiring a laserdisc player. So, I’m a little confused on why this isn’t
just called a laserdisc. I’m sure somebody in the comments will explain. And of course, you can’t talk about laserdisc
without talking about RCA Selectavision. These aren’t really optical discs, rather capacitive.
I think Techmoan did a good video explaining these. Of course, inside the cartridge you’d
find a dark looking disc like this. This one has seen better days, of course. And then
of course, there’s another type of video on disc. This one is called VHD. This format
wasn’t really ever sold in the USA, but had some success in Japan and Europe. It is
also stored inside of a plastic cartridge and again, I believe Techmoan did a great
video explaining about this format. So, moving along. I thought this was another
video format for a kid’s game console, but later on, I realized it was a game, not an
actual video. Still, it is a great idea to put this inside of a cartridge as you really
can’t expect kids to handle optical discs with the care they need to keep them from
getting scratched up. Although this one is somehow a little dirty anyway. Moving along, these discs actually really
are a video format. These came out in 2003. The Video Now format uses a technology identical
to the original compact disc to manufacture the discs, but the discs themselves are slightly
smaller than a regular CD or DVD. So, for comparison, here’s a regular old DVD and
you can see the VideoNow disc is slightly smaller. These were actually meant to be played
in these little kid’s video players with a tiny screen on them like this. These discs
could hold a little over 20 minutes of low-quality video at 15 frames per second. But, kids probably
didn’t care about the quality, especially on the tiny screen. So here’s another weird format. This is
called a DIVX disc. And a lot of people confuse that with the video codec known as DIVX, which
is spelled the exact same way. But there is actually nothing at all related between the
two things, other than the name. It’s the same physical structure as a regular DVD,
but it was encrypted differently. DIVX discs were considered a rental format where you
would buy the disc for a few dollars, but in order to play it, your DIVX player would
connect with a modem to an online service and charge your account every time you play
the disc. This system was being pushed by Circuit City in the early days as a competitor
to DVD. Some companies such as LucasArts and Disney were choosing to only release movies
on this format in the early days. Fortunately, it was a market failure. Now here’s another type of rental format.
This was also a disc you would buy for a few bucks, and take home. Notice that it has a
caution label “do not open until ready to watch movie.” It says over here that “the
disc will discolor and become unplayable 48 hours after the vacuum seal is broken.”
And obviously, this one is already discolored and unplayable. These were meant to be played
and thrown in the trash. Probably not great for the environment, but notice they call
it a green disc and emphasize that it can be recycled. Yeah, right. I bet had these
taken off, most would be in landfills. Probably another format we can be glad didn’t succeed. And another type of DVD is, of course, HD-DVD.
This was a competitor to Bluray that came out in 2006. I suspect most people have long
forgotten about this. And I suppose one neat thing about this was that they could be hybrid
discs. So, this one for example has the content in high definition on side A, but then flip
it over and side B was a traditional DVD. So this format could have made a great successor
to DVD since you could start buying the high def stuff before you even upgraded your player! Next up. I think this is some sort of religious
thing. But what makes it an interesting format is that it is a hybrid. So, notice on this
side it says DVD. But, if you flip it over, notice that it says CD over here. So you can
play this as a video disc, or a music CD depending on which side you use. So, that’s pretty
neat. And here’s another sort of weird hybrid.
So, on this side it is a regular CD for music. But, turn it over and it is a vinyl record.
And since CDs are actually read from the bottom anyway, technically this disc is always played
with the vinyl side up. As you can see this is called a Vinyldisc. Now, it can only hold
3.5 minutes of audio on the vinyl side. And while there is more physical space for grooves,
it's not used because it would technically bring most record player’s tone arms in
closer to the center than they were designed. Still, a very neat concept. OK, so here’s something you may not have
seen. This is a CD, believe it or not. Of course, if you turn it over you’ll see it’s
basically just a standard 3 inch single with a bunch of extra plastic. Now, one thing that
occurs to me is that clearly there is more plastic on the bottom than on the top. So
you’d think this would play out of balance. But, I suspect since this is an audio CD,
it plays at 1X speed, so it probably doesn’t have enough RPM to cause it to wobble. Next up here, we have what appears to be a
classical music CD. But, what makes it different is that it is considered a “Super Audio
CD.” These came out in 1999 and were supposed to offer higher quality and more channels
over the traditional 2 channels. They use DVD technology to hold a lot more data on
the disc. But, these were a market failure as almost nobody could tell the difference
between this and regular CD quality. Here’s a bit of a mysterious one. It looks
like a CD. You may notice it says “MODisc” on the center. Well, I presume that means
magneto-optical disc of some sort. But I haven’t been able to find any data on this. One interesting
thing is that you can actually see right through it. A very similar looking disc here actually
is called an M-Disc. And This is just an archival type of DVD recordable, but interestingly
enough, it is also somewhat transparent. These were supposed to be more reliable than regular
DVD for long-term storage. Of course, this poor thing is scratched to pieces, so I doubt
it would read anyway. And another type of writable disc. This is
a CD-RW, but what makes it unique is that is a double-density CD-RW. And it holds 1.3
GB of data. Obviously it would require a proprietary drive to burn and read these, though. And one more video format. This is the Sony
Professional Disc. This came out in 2003 and was sort of a predecessor to Bluray, as it
uses similar technology. These were used in some of Sony’s camcorder products for video
recording, but were also used as a data storage product that could hold 23 gigabytes of data.
One thing I think is really cool about it is how the shutter works, watch this. Isn’t
that cool? It has a write protect notch right here. These were pretty cool, but when Bluray
came out, this technology was discontinued. Here’s another more commercial type optical
disk called UDO or ultra-density optical. These were first introduced by Sony in the
year 2000. Notice that it has dual shutters. You can see there are two very thick discs
inside there, facing opposite directions, of course. This disc can hold 30 Gigabytes,
but later models could hold up to 80 Gigabytes. Here’s another similar media, I think this
may have been the predecessor to UDO, but I’m not sure. Speaking of weird Sony formats, here’s an
Optical Disc Archive. These were considered a competitor to LTO tapes for enterprise backups
and storage. Presumably you insert this entire cartridge into a machine. But, lets have a
look inside. Apparently what we have are 12 write-once optical discs. I’m not entirely
sure what kind of discs these are, but they obviously hold about 25 gigabytes each, so
probably similar to Bluray. I have one more media type to show, but this
doesn’t fit any particular category. This is a bubble memory cartridge from the 1980s.
This was a type of non-volatile RAM that could be used for storage, much like flash memory
is used today. So you might call this the predecessor to the SD card or something. And I have to give a shout out to the latest
episode of Red Dwarf where they have apparently constructed the largest floppy disk ever.
And, of course, a giant floppy drive to match! And that about wraps this up. Now, I’m sure
there’s going to be some person that’s like screaming at their computer screen going,
“But…. But, you didn’t show this or that type of media!” So, just to be clear,
this was never meant to be like all-inclusive. I’m sure there’s some media types I didn’t
cover. But hopefully everybody learned at least something interesting about some old
types of media. Also a big thanks goes out to Foone Turing
and Kevin Williams for loaning me many of the different types of media that you’ve
seen in this video. Also, if there’s a particular type of media that you think deserves it’s
own dedicated video to explore it further, then tell me about it in the comments or send
me an email! As always, stick around for the next episode,
and thanks for watching!
That's not a cassette.... THIS IS A CASSETTE!!!!
I just finished a 12hr shift but I know what just cheered my day up!
oh hey that's my media.
I did a twitter thread where I explain most of the "I don't know what this is" formats:
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1252529664221802497
It really hurt to see him ripping those new unused 5.25" floppy disks apart.
Does he talk about MO?
11/10 on that intro
Just watched this and came to this sub knowing I'd find it already posted.
The one that piqued my curiosity the most was the 600MB data cassette at 17:04 that looks almost exactly like a compact audio cassette. If you look carefully you'll see it doesn't have the felt pad the head presses against in compact cassettes, which makes sense because no sensible digital format records linearly. But this would mean that the tape is dragged out of the cassette itself and wrapped around a head drum, and that prompts the question of why would you want standard compact cassette cutouts in front - surely a tape extraction system would have an easier time if the whole front of the tape was open.
Or it might mean that a rotating head drum is somehow pressed inside the cassette itself, but that doesn't sound feasible as it'd need to be really tiny to fit in there.
And also - why the holes at the bottom for the capstans to fit through? If the tape is wrapped around a drum, surely there'd be more effective ways of actually moving the tape along, if nothing else because you could use much larger and stronger capstans and rollers.
It's not a matter of reusing molds from compact cassettes either, because the extra cutouts and little differences in the shape suggest this was molded specifically for this format.
It almost looks like they really wanted this to be able to be inserted in a standard audio tape transport (not that you could do much other than rewind it in one, given the lack of the felt pad) - until you realise that it isn't compatible anyway, because the holes for the sprockets are closed at the top, and the vast majority of players have protruding sprockets, so they wouldn't fit.
All I can think of is that perhaps they used some kind of alternative tech where you'd have high-bandwidth helical-scan type recording - or possibly directly vertical across the tape - without the use of a rotating head; I'd imagine more modern tech could get there with solid-state componentry. And the cassette-lookalike shape might perhaps allow the drives to work with standard audio cassettes - perhaps they'd be digitally recordable in them. But this is just conjecture; the whole thing remains a mystery.
HEY! LOOK AT THIS OLD STORAGE MEDIUM!
Had a QIC-80 drive (floppy connector) in my windows 3.1 days. Work had a Parallel port version that made screeching sounds. Took hours to do a full backup.
Upgraded to a TR-3 drive ( Parallel port) version
The days of old getting tape drive, zip drive, scanner and printer to run off a Parallel port!