Digital portables archaeology

As more and more movies are being either edited in accordance to current political climate or locked up in online vaults, physical becomes important to ensure the access.

In the U.S., movies are still released on DVDs, and sometimes DVD is all you have, especially for TV series. Say, the first season of "The Americans" was available on DVD and Blu-ray, but the consecutive seasons on DVD only. "Halt and Catch Fire" - DVD only.

I just got myself a multi-region DVD player in working condition for $4 from thrift store, including the remote. My old $200 multi-region player died during blackout several years ago.

Regarding HDDs, I am making another video now, and the breakthrough happened in 1997-1998, when GMR effect finally was put to work. IBM Deskstar, baby! The largest model was 16.8 GB. Before it, HDDs were 2 GB max. Also, RAM price dropped 100x from 1992 to 1998. Having a 2GB buffer in a portable CD player became possible and cheap.

 

If you want to see what a £3000 disk drive looked like look here
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/discs/brochures/CDC_9715_FSD_Brochure_Mar82.pdf
Although it is a 1980s design, Seagate were still making them and we were buying them in the early 1990s.
At the time DOS only supported partitions up to 32MBytes, although I doubt if anyone used such drives with DOS.

It is well worth looking at some archive magazines etc to check dates. I think it was 1997 when after much research I spent £135 on a 4GB Fujitsu Hard Drive.
8GB drives were available but cost £300 !

Completely back on topic if anyone has ever wondered what made the iPod Mini possible


For a size reference the whole board is sat on a cassette.
I believe the Microdrives were a joint venture between IBM and Hitachi

 

I am sorry, I cannot stand him. He may know a thing or two about computers, but all this audio/video stuff is not his forte. I understand that he have never used it, I guess he is too young, but at least do a proper research. His guests, who are supposed to be experts, are even dumber than him. I also don't like the style of his videos, they mimic dumbed-down and gamefied style of TV shows, they are long, talkative, with exagerrated emotions, this is the last thing I want to watch, on Youtube of all places.

Several other people did a good job explaining W-VHS (analog) and D-VHS (digital), including Techmoan: