108 Rare and Bizarre Media Types

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0:00 - Intro
1:14 **** Mechanical Media ****
——————————————
1:14 - Edison Cylinder
1:44 - Long Play Microgroove
1:56 - Motorola 3-channel stereo record
2:12 - Single-Sided Victrola
2:33 - Edison Diamond Disc
2:56 - 16” Vinyl Records
3:53 - Punch Cards
4:06 - Punch Tape
4:20 - Flexidisc (computer program on vinyl)

5:02 **** Magnetic Media ****
——————————————
5:06 - 8” Floppy Disks
5:34 - 500K Floppy Disk
6:00 - Hard Sectored Floppy Disks
6:43 - Quad Density Floppy Disks
6:54 - Apple Fileware (Twiggy Disks)
7:27 - Demidisk Prototpye 4” Floppy
7:42 - 3.25” Flex Diskette
8:08 - Brother Micro Disk
8:20 - TEC Floppy Disk
8:31 - Amsoft CF-2 Compact Floppy
8:53 - MCD Cassette
9:12 - Video Floppy Disk
9:38 - LT-1 2” Floppy
9:51 - IT Floppy 144 MB
10:03 - Iomega Zip and LS-120
10:38 - Iomega Click! Disk
11:05 - Large Reel-to-Reel tapes
11:40 - Reel-to-Reel Audio tape
12:01 - U-Matic Video Cassettes
12:42 - Betamax inside VHS container
13:08 - Sony SD-1 Cassette
14:17 - XD 1/2” Digital Video Cassette
14:44 - Video 120 Cassette
15:18 - ADAT Digital Mastering Cassette
15:44 - 8mm Movie Prerecorded
16:14 - Datasonix
16:30 - MicroMV Video Cassette
16:48 - MiniDV Video Cassette
16:53 - 8mm Data Cassette
17:04 - Unknown CS-600 SX Data Cassette
17:19 - CVC Microvideo Cassette
17:35 - DCC (Digital Compact Cassette)
18:03 - Blank 8-Track Audio Cassette
18:21 - Sinclair MicroDrive
18:39 - Stringy Floppy
18:59 - 18 Different Home Backup Formats
19:12 - Iomega Ditto
19:20 - Syquest 200 MB cartridge
19:23 - ADR
19:28 - Iomega REV Disk
19:40 - 10 Different Pro Backup Formats
19:42 - DDS4 Tape
19:50 - LTO Tape

20:06 **** Optical Media ****
——————————————
20:09 - Prerecorded Film Roll - Educational
20:52 - Prerecorded Film Roll - Consumer
21:05 - MO Disc
21:21 - MiniDisc
21:26 - Floptical
21:40 - Dataplay
21:54 - Sanyo ID Photo
22:51 - LM1200 WORM Disc
23:18 - WDM-6DA0 WORM disc
24:05 - Maxell LM4000 WORM disc
24:14 - PD (Phase Change Dual)
25:30 - DVD RAM 5.2 GB
26:16 - NEC MVDisc
26:28 - DVD RAM 9.4 GB
27:04 - Laserdisc 12”
27:27 - Laserdisc 8”
27:57 - CD-Video 5”
28:29 - CD-Video 8”
28:50 - RCA Selectavision CED
29:07 - VHD
29:23 - V.Flash
29:43 - VideoNow
30:18 - DIVX
31:04 - FlexPlay
31:40 - HD-DVD
32:08 - Hybrid CD/DVD
32:26 - Hybrid CD/Vinyl
32:58 - Shaped CD Audio
33:21 - Super Audio CD
33:46 - MODisc
34:00 - MMDisc
34:17 - Double Density CD-RW
34:32 - Sony Professional Disc
35:02 - UDO (Ultra Density Optical)
35:29 - Sony Optical Disc Archive
35:44 - Bubble Memory

[j.t.illingworth]

Those floppy disks were having a 35 year slumber until their guts were ripped out.

[sniderg]

I cannot help but imagine that each of these defunct formats was the culmination of some person's life work.

[wilhelmtaylor]

I was the opto-mechanical engineer at Plasmon in 2002-2004. I hold several of the patents on the media you showed (LM1200) and the machines that read them. The media is 2 glass plates spaced ~1mm apart, with vacuum deposited Tellurium Oxide on the inner surfaces. The laser burned physical holes on the order of 100nm. This disc held 1GB and was used in hospitals, data centers and even the library of congress. The military was a big customer as well. We followed up with a 2GB version within a year. The media was accessed by 2 readers, 1 per side. We also developed a disc center, about the size of a refrigerator, which held 48 or 96 discs which were randomly accessible. A whopping 96GB at your fingertip!

[honeythunder]

Not sure if someone already mentioned it but I.R.S. was a record label in the 80’s. That tape is presumably music videos. This video is fantastic!

[ZTenski]

6:21 the removal of the platters from those floppy cartidges gave me that wrenching feeling in my gut, as if millions of bits suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.. Pure carnage.

[FooneTuring]

Hi, I'm the Foone Turing who loaned a bunch of these to the 8-Bit Guy! Some explanations for the ones without info:

7:27 - Demidiskette Prototype: This as an IBM floppy from '83, it never came out. This is a very early one because the promotional info IBM put out had hard shelled disks.
8:08 - Brother Micro Disc: Used on professional embroidery/sewing machines
8:53 - MCD Cassette. A Hungarian design from 1973, Commodore evaluated it, but in the end it only got used some by some Eastern Bloc kit-computers.
9:12 - Video Floppy Disk: The explanation is correct for the right disk, but the left one is actually a digital data variant of the same media, used on Sony wordprocessors.
13:08 - Sony SD-1 Cassette: This is a data tape variant of the earlier D1 tape, which contained uncompressed digital video. Sony just reused the tapes for the ID-1 backup system.
21:26 - Floptical: This one is actually in the wrong section: Floptical disks are magnetic, not optical, but they're called that because they use an optical method to accurately position the read/write head.
21:40 - Dataplay: An amusing thing about this disk is that he calls out that TechMoan did a video on them. This is actually one of the disks shown in the Techmoan video! He gave me one after the video was completed.
22:51: WORM discs: There's really two types here. The first one shown is the Sony CRVDisc, which is an analog recordable video format similar to laserdisc. Techmoan did a good video on these, they were used in education, museums, TV production, and training.
The other type is the data discs, which were used in two ways:
1. Optical Libraries. This is where you'd have like 50 of them slotted into a rack, and a robot arm that could pull them out and swap them into a reader. This let you have tons of data (for 1987, at least) available. This was a big deal when hard drives were small and expensive.
2. Financial records. The SEC required these to be used for securities trading, because it meant the broker-dealers could stream trades out to them as they happened, and the SEC could then later audit them without worry that they'd been altered (since WORM discs can't be overwritten)
26:16 - NEC MVDisc: This was used in a Japan-only DVR, the GigaStation MV-10000. The idea was that swappable discs was a better storage medium for recorded TV than an internal hard drive, since you could build up a library of them. It failed.
28:29 - CD-Video 8": The reason this looks like a laserdisc yet is labeled CD-Video is simple: It is just a laserdisc. They were trying to do a soft-relaunch of laserdisc under the CD-Video name, and this is one of the discs made for that effort.
33:46 - MODisc: This is just a M-Disc. The logo is confusing.
35:26 - the similar-to-UDO disk is a small WORM disc.

[raymondanimalcrossing]

I can only imagine that 30 years from now there will be a "the 64-bit guy" doing videos on things we have now and it would be like
"Now this is a microsd card from Sandisk. Despite its size it only holds 1 terabyte of data. Now back then that was a huge deal, since it fit more data than the entire data production of humanity up to the 1960's into the size of a fingernail, but these were eventually killed off by the rise of quantum memory in the mid 2030's.

[Geologist_Mike]

About that giant audio cassette: The Sony SD1-1300LA is actually a type of data storage tape. It belongs to the Super AIT (SAIT) family of tape formats, which were designed for high-capacity data backup and archiving. The SD1-1300LA is an SAIT-1 tape that offers a native storage capacity of 500 GB (uncompressed) and 1.3 TB (terabytes) when using a 2.6:1 compression ratio.

These tapes were used primarily in enterprise environments and data centers for reliable long-term storage and backup of large amounts of data. The SAIT format, including the SD1-1300LA, provided high capacity, fast transfer rates, and durability, making it suitable for businesses and organizations that required secure and efficient data storage solutions.

[staticfanatic]

me: "i'm not THAT big of a geek."
8-bit guy: "here's forty minutes of weird media."
me: "yes pls"

[MichaelXX]

4:57 "If enough people are interested" YES I AM INTERESTED

[DarthEd]

I.R.S. was a music label. That’s the video of R.E.M.’s “Pretty Persuasion”, like what MTV would play. That tape is probably quite valuable to R.E.M. collectors!

[Craig_Anderson]

If you add '0:00 - Intro' to the beginning of your table of contents, YouTube will automatically map all of them onto the video timeline!

[jobsgarage]

The Edison type wax cylinders touch a string in my heart, as this unlikely media (via a later transfer on a compact cassette) are the reason I am aware of what my grandfather's voice sounded like. And it kind of sounded like mine. He passed away decades before I was born.

[Shadow]

they shouldnt have ditched the "CD in a floppy case" format.. it gives them soo much more longevity from scratches..

[Nacho-Mamma]

The single sided 78 @ 2:23 is actually used for mainly on air broadcasting. Although a consumer could purchase the same recording that included a side b, single sided 78rpms were easier to catalog in a station archive. I grew up in a home without a television until 1972. Until then, we had 3 pianos, an radio & a Victrola with nearly 500 78rpms. The victrola sat beside the piano I always played, and is how I actually learned to play. I would pluck out what I heard, eventually becoming a mimic pianist. It’s funny that when I finally was sent for piano lessons, I taught my teacher things she didn’t know. Listening to the 78 recordings of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” is how I learned to play it, and was the pianist with our local symphony orchestra in 1982.

[mrb]

28:55 Technology Connections recently completed a *5* part deep dive on the CED. It’s worth a watch!

[flumpis]

"I'll show you a dirty trick for removing the media from these without using any cutting tools."


BUT AT WHAT COST

[TheRandomZachChannel]

I love how you and LGR frequently give each other shoutouts. It’s cool to see such a tight community.

[timacrow]

When I worked for Muzak in the 1990s, I saw some of those 16" records. They played at 16 RPM and held about an hour of music. They were one-sided and had a pattern etched into the back surface. At the time I saw them, they were very old archival pieces that were being digitized for the company's 75th anniversary.

[wyattroncin]

3:53 regarding punch cards, they actually predate the 20's by centuries, with the first punch card programmed semi-automated loom invented in 1725, and the first fully automated loom invented in 1804. As for data storage, the 1890 US census was recorded and tabulated via punch card and counting machines.

There's also the long history of musical devices which played on pinned drums or cut and punched plates or sheets, which could be seen as a type of basic punch card as well.