CD had just been introduced that everybody already envisioned a recordable version of it - Philips and Sony of course, Sanyo as well and a couple of others.

Nakamichi however, was the first to show a commercially available and functional CD recorder : the OMS-1000. It didn't go much further, though, but cost Nakamichi a heck of a lot of funds which probably lacked just as much when, later in the 1980s, the brand's flagship products started to sell... not so well. That is : if the Etsuro brothers indeed developed the OMS-1000 all on their own - something I'm willing to believe... partly.

The OMS-1000 wasn't a CD recorder like we all use since the mid 1990s and can buy nowadays for 20€ : it is a magneto-optical recorder, much like what, again, Sanyo advocated (to no avail) until the early 1990s . The Philips/Sony Orange Book, however, put an end to all other proposals for recordable CD, by way of, among others, recent Taiyo Yuden patents.

This first OMS allows to record, erase and play magneto-optical discs of various formats as well as play regular CDs. Inside are an EFM mod/demod, a 16-bit digital-to-analogue converter, a 16-bit analogue-to-digital converter, along regular analogue rec/play amps.
The drive section allows to choose rotation direction as well as rotation speeds between 1,2m/s and 4m/s, in 0,1m/s steps ; the laser power can be altered with 0,1mW steps.

The OMS-1000 was first presented in october 1983 in New York and had a (prospective) retail price of 10MF or something like... 1,000,000€ ! For those who couldn't afford that much, the contemporary Nakamichi OMS-70 and Nakamichi OMS-50 were also available, even if they couldn't record.

The image above comes from a 1984 japanese ad while the tech details were sourced from the news section of an industry magazine - if anybody has more details and better images - please share them !