Mini Discs

There was a thread on the Steve Hoffman forums asking the question of why the Mini Disc music format didn't succeed. It did have a decent shelf life. Here in this post I attempt to answer that question as I was a long time user of MD's, still use them from time to time.

Mini-discs as an overall format stuck around for quite a long time. Not as long as cassettes or CD's but they hung around. I remember when they launched in 1992 with huge displays in the stores and a lot of prerecorded albums available in that format and it was around 1994 when I bought my last player in the store (I ordered more players on eBay after that) and J&R Music World still sold blank MD's until about a year or two ago. I contemplated getting a Mini Disc player when they first came out but they were expensive and the individual prerecorded discs were expensive, 16.99 or 18.99, I don't remember exactly but they never seemed to be on sale. That might have been why the prerecorded format never caught on in terms of having a chance at replacing CD's. I didn't hear much about MD's for awhile after a year or two and even thought they had become another example of a technology that had slipped away when in 1997 a friend told me he picked up a player and really liked it. I ended up getting my first unit in 1998 and then a few years later when the MD-LP format that allowed more than the 74 or 80 minutes.. At least until the iPod became available in mass quantities, the MD-LP concept seemed to breath new life into Mini Discs as new units seemed to come out frequently. Then as MP3 came out, the final nail seemed to be placed into MD's. I still see them from time to time on the train and I still use my S-1 unit when I go on vacation, it's a very well made portable unit that can take a lot of abuse.

Stephen A. Douglas

To understand Abraham Lincoln, one should look at the life of his nemesis and in a way, stepping stone to greatness, Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas, while four years younger than Lincoln, was a major force in Illinois and later United States politics at an earlier point than Lincoln. When the two debated in the election for Douglas's Senate seat in 1858, Douglas was considered the masterful debater and Lincoln the uncouth upstart. Those debates have been studied over and over again as a model of two masters of the craft of debating. Douglas won the election, winning his third term in the Senate over Lincoln but Lincoln made an impact on the country and was able to capitalize on that to win the Republican nomination for President in 1860 and subsequently the general election for the Presidency. There are countless books on aspects of Lincoln's life both in print and out of print and there are countless general biographies of him but a single biography of Douglas is hard to find. That said, I managed to track down Robert Johannsen's massive bio of Douglas, first published in 1973 and subsequently in 1991. At 874 pages plus massive endnotes and index, this book is as much a definitive biography as we are likely to get. It goes into great detail about those turbulent times in the mid 1800's as tension over slavery threatened to rip to USA to pieces. Douglas died just as the Civil War was beginning but not before he put aside his rivalry with Lincoln and the two worked together, Lincoln as President, Douglas as a powerful Senator who still commanded a considerable amount of respect in the country.