basically all cutting edge tech from my teen years:
Discman was a Sony trademarked name only. That in the museum was a portable MP3 compact disc player with remote.
Yeah this gives the vibe of some poorly-researched hipster pop up “museum”
Perhaps a problem in museum, but at least where I live any highly portable CD player like this gets called “discman” same as with portable cassette players being called “walkman”.
Yeah what is that called when a product name becomes a common noun? Nintendo fought this so that “Nintendo” didn’t become synonymous with “videogame console.”
Trademark erosion?
I had a diskman when they were dying to pure MP3 players.
It was an ATRAK3 plus (a proprietary compression format) and CD player combo that came with software to burn whole libraries on standard CDs, complete with folders and everything.
It was cool as hell, a built-in an/fm tuner, and I used it for work for years along with a single rewritable cd. I had different folders for different languages and genres and shit.
You can buy them on eBay now for like $30, which ironically is more than I paid for it in 2002-4 or whatever it was, however the software to convert to the ATRAK3 plus format was super super hard to find even in the early naughties, unless you have the installer disc.
They should have put one of those into the museum. Would have been way cooler and more informative and shit
You confirmed my suspicions. I immediately looked at the tag and knew it probably wasn’t a Discman because there ain’t no way Sony wouldn’t have trademarked that name.
And it’s not even the first of its type. I had a 1st gen Phillips Expanium that I got back in 2000.
A pretty shitty museum really. Discman was only made by Sony.
I was gonna say, this museum had one job and they failed it
And why would you want one from 2002 instead of more of an OG like the Sony d-777 from around 1994.
the one pictured could play mp3 cds, you could actually walk with it. i want the OG where even thinking of a bump would make it skip.
Ain’t no way that’s a Discman. I have a Sony one from the 90s on my desk, for one. Two, I thought Sony had the trademark on Discman? And three, that’s Panasonic and doesn’t have Discman anywhere on it.
So unless Discman wasn’t trademarked and became synonymous with CD players, I refuse to accept that’s a discman!
I was gonna say the same thing, but I’m glad you did. Makes me feel old anyway.
It’s Sony, y’all. If there’s infringement to be imposed upon you know they’ll be right there swingin’ their Sony balogna.
Yet Wikipedia says Sony launched it in 1984 but changed the name to Walkman at some point
When I was a little kid my dad’s old retired police cruiser still had an 8-track player in it. Y’all ain’t that old. I was there for that thing’s entire lifecycle, then portable mp3 players’ too. Streaming on mobile will probably last a while though.
I had this exact model ! Burned a CD with all the Linkin Park, Sum 41, Blink 182, Rage against the machine, System of a Down, Red hot chili peppers, and more !
Those were simpler times…
You have an exquisite taste in music.
Papercuts is a jam
It’s still probably my favourite song of all time lol
All at 128kbps!
I recently found my first mobile phone model in a museum. I know the feeling.
i found one in the basement. 15% battery life left.
I used to sell that model when it was the new hotness.
I had a Nokia 5110 too.
Yeah, that’s a low blow. Not a Walkman, not just a portable Cd player, a bloody mp3 cd with a remote on the headphones from 2002. Who are you calling old, eh? Kids these days have no respect
I’ve seen a 3DS in the Technical Museum in Vienna.
Now that’s some nonsense, my mate’s kid still uses his, and he’s like 10
Not saying it necessarily belongs there, just that I saw it there.
Then again it was in a display about the evolution of consumer tech, and there were some newer smartphones there too, so I guess it did fit well into that.
It says MP3 on it. I remember when I was a kid, I wanted a mp3-player because it was the hot shit. So I bought a Panasonic discman that said “MP3” on it. That’s when I learned what “mp3-disks” are and how to quickly navigate through 400 songs using one button
Walking down the street, cradling the thing like a baby because the slightest bump would cause it to skip, those were the days xD
In 2002 they would all have anti-skip, even the cheap knock offs. The skipping was just in the early 90s.
Anti skip was awesome. I remember showing my friend’s dad and tapping it and stuff and it keep playing and his eyes went wide. Then he bought a minidisc player and blew MY mind.
Anti skip wasn’t completely anti skip if it took a massive jolt but for sure it was like magic compares to the old ones which needed to be preferably flat on a table xD
One massive jolt was okay, but sustained vibration was not. Anti-skip worked by caching a few seconds in the future and playing that when the laser lost focus. More than a couple seconds of no laser contact and the cache runs out.
I mean I was doing a paper round around 2000 and the one I owned certainly didn’t have anti-skip to begin with and even when they did have anti-skip that doesn’t mean that it never skipped as later ones I had with it only had “x seconds of anti skip” so if it receives a big jolt that shit was still skipping
And the CDs needed to be handled with kid gloves
I had one, and it was great for listening to my CDs when I was laying in bed, but if I had to actually walk anywhere I took my walkman and a bookbag full of tapes (half of which were books on tape and not actual music lol). Dealing with the skipping was just too damn irritating. Walkman was the clear winner for my use case
It’s not even the oldest one. I had to wait like three Christmases until I could play mp3s on a disk without converting them first.
Wait until you see the home computer you grew up with, along with a joystick and selection of game tapes/discs including some of your favourites, in a glass case in a museum of technology; then you are free to crumble to dust.
God. Had A and B and the VIC-20 before A.
Damn kid you had the high tech newfangled round clear gel looking shit.
I had the original 6AA battery disc man where you can either listen to music for a couple of drives without skipping, or a week if you didn’t turn the anti skip buffer on.
The anti-skip sucked battery?
Horribly, it read the disk into a memory buffer, then played from the buffer. Ram was expensive, tiny, and power hungry back then. It was pretty shock-sensitive too. Every time it detected a fail, it would have to seek/re-read the section. If you had some decent bass, the song itself could set it off :)
It wasn’t the buffer itself that drew power. It was the need to physically spin the disc faster in order to read the data to build up a buffer. So it would draw more power even if you left it physically stable. And then, if it would actually skip in reading, it would need to seek back to where it was to build up the buffer again.
Sure didn’t seem like it was doing that, It took 6 seconds for it to start playing to fill that six second buffer. But I lacked the equipment to test its playback speed back then. So maybe you’re right.
More battery drain with anti-skip.
The tables have turned later on. The anti-skip would extend battery life. It would get enough buffer allowing the CD to spin-down and then it would spin back up when needed. This time could be even longer if playing MP3.For example, my Panasonic SL-CT520 does 100 second “anti-skip” (at this point it’s not really just anti-skip), and with MP3 cites up to 155h of playback time. Unfortunately, the unit I have can’t play CD-RW (it is mentioned in the manual) which probably means a degraded laser.
But even with CDDA, my Sony D-EJ000 cites 16 hours with anti-skip and only 11 hours without anti-skip. Unfortunately, in this case the anti-skip also reduces audio quality slightly since it uses lossy compression, so I keep it off.
At least I think that’s what the manual is trying to sayTo enjoy high quality CD sound, select “G-off”.
Always love antishock
