DataPlay: The futuristic optical disc format that time forgot

Oops.

And now you can get half a terabyte in a card the size of your thumbnail for less that $50. Kinda crazy just how hard flash and computer storage prices have fallen. I remember just 10 years ago when even 16gb of storage on an iPod was immense to me, and now I buy terabytes of storage for my PC like it's nothing. I'd love to see a video on flash memory formats, especially some obscure ones from the early days.

Strange music format from the early 2000's; I hope Avril Lavigne comes out on it!

I am a media collector - has anyone an idea where to buy one of these DataPlays?

So, it was basically a miniature CD-R. No wonder it failed, especially if people already had flash memory MP3 players in 1999. I don't get how they couldn't have predicted that flash memory would continue to increase in capacity. Didn't this come out when the IPOD was around!?

Get yourself some "Tar and Wax remover" spray from Turtle Wax, to get rid of the "soft touch" coating. :)

How much could DataPlay store if made today?

beep me ive seen them b4 lol not the disc but the player lol

Your channel is one of the best!

Can’t imagine having to keep track of all those damn things. “Where’s my blank album!!?”

YOOO!!! Its the thing from 'spy kids 4D: all the time in the world'. Truly, the movie of all time.

It s really, Let Go...

No luck getting a new DataPlay player, right?
These things are nowhere to be found...

Agent K, Men in Black: "this is gonna replace CDs soon"

it’s such a shame that the company was too small to get past their bankruptcy, as they clearly had a vision for the dataplay format and its future potential! i do hope that your searches find fruit, and thanks for making these great videos exploring old forgotten media and formats, keep it up!

Some things are way too small to be practical. I think regular MD was the best format ever.

I want a data play player and data play music tape where can I get these at?

If these weren't write once and flash storage hadn't started to get cheaper I could have seen these being a big success. 10 bucks for 500mb? And on that little disc? It was a great concept

its funny how all these small cds failed and then sony comes out and makes basically the same thing for psp with the UMDs lol

The Imation super drive I had on my college PC was the bee's knees, I thought, but this would have been so much better.

Incredible. What might be the last chance to experience a dead, short lived format by bringing together the items from multiple sources, and the machine craps out in the middle! Truly it was not meant to be.

Gotta say ive never heard of this one

Psp umd movies made sense but I never had money and the screen was too small.

I think this was the disc that was used in that Kirk Cameron "Left Behind" movie! I remember a tiny disc being used on a computer and thinking "that looks a lot better than the zip drives I'm using". In college we had to choose between 3" floppy, zip, or CD-R (and hope you got a computer lab system that could read CD-Rs).

that sticky coating is also a big problem on luxury cars of the era- the hunt for "soft touch plastics" to please auto reviewers lead to this false solution that bedevils many a modern-classic auto

Men In Black

That's kinda sad. It was a neat format idea, but they compromised its functionality too much for consumers to appease record companies that just left them to hang.

It's a shame, because that would've been a neat way to store music and data before flash drives overtook it and even then, a new version(similar to CD -> DVD -> Bluray) could've kept it going for a while longer

OASIS? I think they meant a mirage.

Well, to be fair, it was called DataPlay not DataRewrite... lol

Those things would be far too easy to lose once out the box....3 days spent looking for 1 dataplay disc. No thanks!😂

Great and cute tech!

So this is what K was talking about in Men in Black. "Guess I'll have to buy the white album again"

Gentle Giant! I just discovered them yesterday. Incredible band.

Discman's where horrible, where big and with all the mass it skipped easy and with only small buffer you had many skipped parts if you moved to much, just walking was enough to upset most discman's. A smaller disk makes it much more stable, MD was already much more stable and those where huge compare this tiny disc, so compare it to discman is not fair.

I remember one shaped like a credit card, what's that called?

So, this is eerily similar to another fictional format: the tiny (re-?)writable optical discs that were the main data format in an episode of alternate-reality sci-fi TV show "Sliders", which I'd have to look up for the exact date, but it must've been within a couple years of when this came out. In that world, computers, and I think music players?, used little discs about that size, and our heroes had to find an unattended computer at a government store to read the contents of a disc they got from, I think, a man being pursued and / or killed by the state police. These contents turned out to the be "Unabridged US Constitution" from the times before the J. Edgar Hoover administration declared martial law and turned the US into a semi-communist / semi-fascist authoritarian police state, where everything was made by government factories and sold in government stores, and all information was government-approved, with many books -- and, of course, the Constitution -- being available only in the "Abridged Edition" that was state-approved. Amusingly, the salesman in the government store tried to sell them the computer by telling them "This is the latest machine, even faster than the black-market machines you can get from Japan!"

At the end, of course, they managed to copy the data from the disk "to the Internet" as that alternate world knew it, which apparently meant "Email the whole United States all at once" before jumping out of that universe to the next one and leaving the American people to, possibly anyway, rise up against their iron-fist rulers. The disc format was remarked upon by our heroes as odd but obviously some kind of data disc, and they didn't mention DataPlay at all. Of course, everything in that world was government-branded with J. Edgar Hoover's face, so it wouldn't have been called DataPlay there anyway. 😛

Cents of size

If i had my UMD should have replaced CD and DVD and be used in every device

500mb on a single dic of that little size? that is amaxing for it's time

I remember the first mini disk player I saw was from a friend on the school bus coming home from middle school. He had kid rock playing his first album on it

I wish these are successful.

These things are so rare that I could never find one.

Dave is a legend! Well, both of them! 🤣

Woooot, Just got myself a 'new' replacement dataplay disc drive, first thing I've been able to grab a hold of Dataplay related in years of searching. Don't think I'll ever get myself a player but hope to get at least one disc...some day. It's surreal to even be holding this drive in my hands, it's so tiny!

Be nice when I get the entire Beatle’s library on a SD card. When the price is realistic!!👍👍👍

This could’ve been successful if not for the proprietary software nonsense.