Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..
Apparently they were reliable but godawful slow, and he was glad to move onto SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards.
This goes into just 6 of the media formats, but there are so many more.
https://www.slashgear.com/1675900/discontinued-sony-formats-...
A more recent example: Archival Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc
Anyway… that was a preamble… in 2001 I spotted some of these in a weird shop in London near Russel Square. They had a sticker price of £150 which I thought was absurd. In one of my very few attempts to haggle in my life, I offered £50 and the shop attendant turned me down flatly. I was mildly disappointed because they were so brazenly “alternate timeline cassette futurism” (before the latter term existed) and the thought that I’d missed a golden opportunity gnawed at me for years. At some point in 2002 or 2003 I went back, but the stock had gone. I doubt they sold any of them at that price in that age.
Anyway, I probably dodged a bullet. They looked cool though.
The emulator (which seems like it's for DOS) seems a strange thing to include on the disc:
><fs> file /ddman.exe
MS-DOS executable, MZ for MS-DOSI suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.
The Data Discman fascinated me ever since I first saw mention of it in a magazine. This was the early 90s so CDs were still Brobdingnagian compared to other storage media at the time. A portable device that could carry an encyclopedia? Amazing! To me at the time they were a Star Trek technology made real.
As an aside I still love Sony's consumer electronics industrial design from the 90s. It was a great intersection of functional and attractive.