8 ms·

The Dawn of PC Multimedia: Laser Discs and CD-ROMs (2013)

57 points by gwern 9y ago

k__ 9y ago
I remember the switch to CD was huge. 1995 I got Lands of Lore (the LoL of our time, hehe) from my uncle in a box of 5-10 floppy disks. 1997 I got one CD with about 20-30 games like WarCraft, Doom, Command&Conquer etc. It was orders of maginitude bigger than what I was used to and only a few times smaller than my 2GB HDD at that time. I only got that feeling again with my USB3 drive I bought 3 years ago that was 128GB big. On the other hand it took a bunch of years till I could get my hands on a used CD burner, because they were so expensive and only a few kids at school could copies, most of them taking around $10 for a copy.
- kh_hk 9y ago
  About CD burners, I remember sharing one with a friend from the same building I was living, by encasing it on an external SCSI box. 4x speed, no less! It took me a while to realize that walking around on my room whilst burning a CD produced corrupted copies.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    I had one that required you to put the disc in a plastic caddy first. Only 1x speed though. Burning from Windows was too unreliable, some interrupt might fire and ruin the disc, you had to drop down to DOS and make sure there weren't any TSRs running, and heaven forbid someone touch your computer while the burn was running. Those CD blanks were expensive. I didn't make too many coasters at least, and they were usually my fault.
  - k__ 9y ago
    haha, yes! I had a 4x speed used CD burner I got from a friend too. It had a 80% success rate.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Heh, i ruined someones money making scheme the day i got my first burner and offered copies at the cost of a blank CDR. Somewhat sad that MO media didn't pick up any steam though, as i kinda miss the day when i could do random RWs on a completely passive media (meaning all the logic lived in a fully replaceable drive). optical discs don't really do RW in the same way as a floppy, HDD or flash chips, but the latter two have a whole lot of embedded logic stuff that can go sour even if the actual storage media is just fine.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Yes, we got some kids later that did this too. First there were a few that used their parents burner. Later some got their own burners and did it for the cost of a blank CDR. The prices of the CDRs dropped too, first I paid like $10 for one and later I got 50 for like $50. Funny thing was, at the beginning the burning was unreliable and the CDRs expensive. Later when they got cheaper the burners also got more reliable.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      There was a great ceremony when burning in the single-speed days where the hard drive could barely keep up. Vibration, buffer underruns, loud noise, they could all trash your burn. You'd set it, then watch, on the edge of your seat, hoping it'd succeed. Then you'd carefully hand this golden artifact to the next person. Later you'd burn a single PSD on a CD-ROM because it's almost cheaper, faster, and more reliable than printing it out.
- scarface74 9y ago
  My first CD burner was around 1998. It used a parallel port and I used it with a laptop. Now that I think about it, I still had a PowerMac back then with SCSI. I don't know why I didn't get a SCSI based CD burner. Also, why didn't they have USB based burners back then?
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    In 1998, most machines barely had USB 1.0 support, much less USB 1.1 support. While USB 1.1 supported up to 15 Mbit/s "full speed", most systems at that time were still only average the 1.5 Mbit/s "low speed", which is just enough to burn a CD at 1X (and I certainly remember how slow 1X seemed; I was quite proud of the 16X burner I had at one point in HS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Back in the mid 90s USB was way too new and unreliable to be trusted to burning optical media. Burners were mostly PATA (ATAPI), or SCSI. There were also some hacks that ran over a Parallel Port, but those seemed like a bad idea to me. SCSI burners were the most reliable, but PC SCSI cards weren't so great. The only one that seemed worthwhile at the time was the Adaptec 2940. Sadly, the SCSI tax was in full force so you paid through the nose for somewhat reliable burns. The USB situation was a bit better in the late 90s (98-99), but even then it was a nontrivial source of blue screens.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        Funny thing about ATAPI is that it is basically SCSI wrapped by ATA (IDE). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface BTW, anyone old enough to remember wrestling with IDE cables without notches? Meaning you had to figure out the orientation of them via the one marked wire at one edge of the ribbon?
- Symbiote 9y ago
  I used the CD ROM drive attached to a computer at my dad's school, around 1994. I think the computer's hard disk was about 200MB, I remember wondering how they put the data in one place to assemble the CD ROM. (And yes, back then it was always "see dee rom ".)
- bitwize 9y ago
  > 1997 I got one CD with about 20-30 games like WarCraft, Doom, Command&Conquer etc. Good old Walnut Creek CDROM.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Haha, didn't know how it was called. I got it two times from different friends on different CDs. Often it was just called "The Game-CD from <FRIENDS_NAME>"
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I wonder if i still have the stack of cover CDs i accumulated during a lonely student year (resulted in a deep seated appreciation for the flexibility of Quake1's Quake-C). I also recall that i developed a habit of making my own utility collection discs once i got a modem and a net connection, to avoid having to download all the various shareware and stuff i invariably found missing after a Windows install.
    - k__ 9y ago
      Same here, back in the days when stuff wasn't outdated every week :D
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    ftp.cdrom.com was such an amazing resource, especially /idgames/. Dialling up 56k and jumping to /incoming/ to see what had just arrived was really fun in it's heyday. There's a kinda archive available on https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom
- sebtoast 9y ago
  >Lands of Lore (the LoL of our time, hehe) Thank you, I was looking for the name of that game for at least ten years.
  - k__ 9y ago
    The RPG of my time, haha. You should look into Legend of Grimrock if you want something more up to date :)
    - sebtoast 9y ago
      Thank you, I didn't expect to find a modern game with that gameplay style.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  When the burner mania reached my country, I made so many lists of games to be compiled on a cd (to give to my nerd guru of the day in hope he would satisfy my wish).
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Loved Laser Discs, home theater a decade+ earlier than anyone I knew. Also had an IDE? 2x CD burner in the late 90s, great for making mix CDs for my car and hoarding warez before moving on to libre software. Good times. Been a while since I've been ahead of the technology curve, and tend to lag it now. Let others do the debugging, haha.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface
- ghaff 9y ago
  Yeah. I have a shelf full of laserdisks and a Pioneer player. Annoyingly, it's the sort of thing that I know is probably worth something to someone but has negative value to me taking space. But I can't really be bothered boxing it up and trying to sell it on eBay either.
United857 9y ago
Surprised the article didn't mention Dragon's Lair[0] -- probably the most popular example of a "interactive" LD app. Probably the first game with full-motion video as well (albeit analog). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_ga...
- pstuart 9y ago
  After the novelty, it wasn't that great a game.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    It's basically the prototype for the Quick Time Event you see in most AAA games these days. AKA "press X to not die".
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Because he brings that game up at length in the very next article.
joezydeco 9y ago
Another early project missed here was the MIT Media Lab's "Aspen Interactive Movie Map (1981)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU
acomjean 9y ago
I found a “blender” magazine on cd rom and decided to see if it was still usable recently. While the menus don’t work on my intel Mac, the video files are readable but so small and very pixelated. It really was pretty full, but the web has really replaced this kind of thing. The disk was surprisingly full though at 600 mb of content. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(magazine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(magazine)
- kccqzy 9y ago
  Probably because early video codecs are terrible. Nowadays with modern codecs we can encode "higher-resolution" (like 320p or 480p) videos that are smaller in file size than the old postage stamp sized videos.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Yep, when divx hit the net and could compress (mangle?) a full length movie to fit on a single CD was a big deal. Before then there was VCD that used MPEG to split a movie across multiple CDs, iirc.
    - glandium 9y ago
      Usually 2 CDs, at lower resolution than DivX.
olivermarks 9y ago
Myst was huge and I was working 90 hours a week doing a cross platform CD ROM in 1995/96, using action script/ macromedia director, debabilizer for 256k color palettes and quicktime ui interction video snippets. It was a black art getting the disk to play on mac and pc - I had an in office ethernet network with mac and pc connected together. The product/project was obsolete a few years later. The big lesson for me was not to go down the cutting edge rat hole, problem solving and details ensnare you and you lose track of time and the market...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Ugh, that reminds me of some cover CDs that used some fancy/horrible macromedia based menu if you didn't kill the autoplay "feature" with fire.
shaunxcode 9y ago
I managed to save up enough to get a plextor 8 speed cd writer. I started a record label with it!
- agumonkey 9y ago
  the stuff of legend. few days ago I saw a yamaha 24x writer in an electronic dump, it was a god of the second wave of improvements.. weird feeling, almost tempted to take it.
dawnerd 9y ago
Found a good series the other day on youtube about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoSTlUIxY7VkJLi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_D... The same channel also has some nice videos on CDs and VHS.
amatecha 9y ago
Ah, this article brings back some nice memories of Christmas in 1993 and receiving Myst as a gift[1]. I was dismayed it required a CD-ROM drive, which we didn't have... except... hey what's this other gift? Our family's first CD-ROM drive! It was a momentous occasion! Nowadays CD drives are basically thrift shop throwaways, but back then they cost $hundreds and you were lucky to read at 4x speed. Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced and it was easy to find huge libraries of neat new stuff to check out. Far more convenient than trying to download stuff at 1-2kB/sec over dialup! :'D [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/
- ghaff 9y ago
  Yeah. When CDs first came out for the PC, you could suddenly have all this neat digital stuff at your fingertips that was effectively not practical to download at any decent rate. You could also start getting photos scanned for the first time.
- chiph 9y ago
  > Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced So many AOL CDs in the mail... I think my first drive was a 2x Plextor internal SCSI that used the caddies. Pros: Never a scratched disc. Cons: You had to acquire & deal with caddies.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I recall running into a caddie drive once. Effectively it was used like a tray drive, with a removable tray...
  - amatecha 9y ago
    Hey, before that was AOL floppies which were great -- free disks to use! Just put some scotch tape over the "write-protect" hole in the disk! hahaha :)
reitanqild 9y ago
BTW: anybody remembers Commodore CDTV? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV
- rasz 9y ago
  Who could forget Mehdis baby, useless and overpriced disaster. And how to recover? by doubling down with CD32!
reaperducer 9y ago
...and shortly thereafter, the built-in PC cupholder was born.

57 points by gwern 9y ago

k__ 9y ago

I remember the switch to CD was huge. 1995 I got Lands of Lore (the LoL of our time, hehe) from my uncle in a box of 5-10 floppy disks. 1997 I got one CD with about 20-30 games like WarCraft, Doom, Command&Conquer etc. It was orders of maginitude bigger than what I was used to and only a few times smaller than my 2GB HDD at that time. I only got that feeling again with my USB3 drive I bought 3 years ago that was 128GB big. On the other hand it took a bunch of years till I could get my hands on a used CD burner, because they were so expensive and only a few kids at school could copies, most of them taking around $10 for a copy.

kh_hk 9y ago
About CD burners, I remember sharing one with a friend from the same building I was living, by encasing it on an external SCSI box. 4x speed, no less! It took me a while to realize that walking around on my room whilst burning a CD produced corrupted copies.
- jandrese 9y ago
  I had one that required you to put the disc in a plastic caddy first. Only 1x speed though. Burning from Windows was too unreliable, some interrupt might fire and ruin the disc, you had to drop down to DOS and make sure there weren't any TSRs running, and heaven forbid someone touch your computer while the burn was running. Those CD blanks were expensive. I didn't make too many coasters at least, and they were usually my fault.
- k__ 9y ago
  haha, yes! I had a 4x speed used CD burner I got from a friend too. It had a 80% success rate.
digi_owl 9y ago
Heh, i ruined someones money making scheme the day i got my first burner and offered copies at the cost of a blank CDR. Somewhat sad that MO media didn't pick up any steam though, as i kinda miss the day when i could do random RWs on a completely passive media (meaning all the logic lived in a fully replaceable drive). optical discs don't really do RW in the same way as a floppy, HDD or flash chips, but the latter two have a whole lot of embedded logic stuff that can go sour even if the actual storage media is just fine.
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes, we got some kids later that did this too. First there were a few that used their parents burner. Later some got their own burners and did it for the cost of a blank CDR. The prices of the CDRs dropped too, first I paid like $10 for one and later I got 50 for like $50. Funny thing was, at the beginning the burning was unreliable and the CDRs expensive. Later when they got cheaper the burners also got more reliable.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    There was a great ceremony when burning in the single-speed days where the hard drive could barely keep up. Vibration, buffer underruns, loud noise, they could all trash your burn. You'd set it, then watch, on the edge of your seat, hoping it'd succeed. Then you'd carefully hand this golden artifact to the next person. Later you'd burn a single PSD on a CD-ROM because it's almost cheaper, faster, and more reliable than printing it out.
scarface74 9y ago
My first CD burner was around 1998. It used a parallel port and I used it with a laptop. Now that I think about it, I still had a PowerMac back then with SCSI. I don't know why I didn't get a SCSI based CD burner. Also, why didn't they have USB based burners back then?
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  In 1998, most machines barely had USB 1.0 support, much less USB 1.1 support. While USB 1.1 supported up to 15 Mbit/s "full speed", most systems at that time were still only average the 1.5 Mbit/s "low speed", which is just enough to burn a CD at 1X (and I certainly remember how slow 1X seemed; I was quite proud of the 16X burner I had at one point in HS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Back in the mid 90s USB was way too new and unreliable to be trusted to burning optical media. Burners were mostly PATA (ATAPI), or SCSI. There were also some hacks that ran over a Parallel Port, but those seemed like a bad idea to me. SCSI burners were the most reliable, but PC SCSI cards weren't so great. The only one that seemed worthwhile at the time was the Adaptec 2940. Sadly, the SCSI tax was in full force so you paid through the nose for somewhat reliable burns. The USB situation was a bit better in the late 90s (98-99), but even then it was a nontrivial source of blue screens.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Funny thing about ATAPI is that it is basically SCSI wrapped by ATA (IDE). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface BTW, anyone old enough to remember wrestling with IDE cables without notches? Meaning you had to figure out the orientation of them via the one marked wire at one edge of the ribbon?
Symbiote 9y ago
I used the CD ROM drive attached to a computer at my dad's school, around 1994. I think the computer's hard disk was about 200MB, I remember wondering how they put the data in one place to assemble the CD ROM. (And yes, back then it was always "see dee rom ".)
bitwize 9y ago
> 1997 I got one CD with about 20-30 games like WarCraft, Doom, Command&Conquer etc. Good old Walnut Creek CDROM.
- k__ 9y ago
  Haha, didn't know how it was called. I got it two times from different friends on different CDs. Often it was just called "The Game-CD from <FRIENDS_NAME>"
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I wonder if i still have the stack of cover CDs i accumulated during a lonely student year (resulted in a deep seated appreciation for the flexibility of Quake1's Quake-C). I also recall that i developed a habit of making my own utility collection discs once i got a modem and a net connection, to avoid having to download all the various shareware and stuff i invariably found missing after a Windows install.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Same here, back in the days when stuff wasn't outdated every week :D
- FooHentai 9y ago
  ftp.cdrom.com was such an amazing resource, especially /idgames/. Dialling up 56k and jumping to /incoming/ to see what had just arrived was really fun in it's heyday. There's a kinda archive available on https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom
sebtoast 9y ago
>Lands of Lore (the LoL of our time, hehe) Thank you, I was looking for the name of that game for at least ten years.
- k__ 9y ago
  The RPG of my time, haha. You should look into Legend of Grimrock if you want something more up to date :)
  - sebtoast 9y ago
    Thank you, I didn't expect to find a modern game with that gameplay style.
agumonkey 9y ago
When the burner mania reached my country, I made so many lists of games to be compiled on a cd (to give to my nerd guru of the day in hope he would satisfy my wish).

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Loved Laser Discs, home theater a decade+ earlier than anyone I knew. Also had an IDE? 2x CD burner in the late 90s, great for making mix CDs for my car and hoarding warez before moving on to libre software. Good times. Been a while since I've been ahead of the technology curve, and tend to lag it now. Let others do the debugging, haha.

digi_owl 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface
ghaff 9y ago
Yeah. I have a shelf full of laserdisks and a Pioneer player. Annoyingly, it's the sort of thing that I know is probably worth something to someone but has negative value to me taking space. But I can't really be bothered boxing it up and trying to sell it on eBay either.

United857 9y ago

Surprised the article didn't mention Dragon's Lair[0] -- probably the most popular example of a "interactive" LD app. Probably the first game with full-motion video as well (albeit analog). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_ga...

pstuart 9y ago
After the novelty, it wasn't that great a game.
- jandrese 9y ago
  It's basically the prototype for the Quick Time Event you see in most AAA games these days. AKA "press X to not die".
digi_owl 9y ago
Because he brings that game up at length in the very next article.

joezydeco 9y ago

Another early project missed here was the MIT Media Lab's "Aspen Interactive Movie Map (1981)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU

acomjean 9y ago

I found a “blender” magazine on cd rom and decided to see if it was still usable recently. While the menus don’t work on my intel Mac, the video files are readable but so small and very pixelated. It really was pretty full, but the web has really replaced this kind of thing. The disk was surprisingly full though at 600 mb of content. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(magazine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(magazine)

kccqzy 9y ago
Probably because early video codecs are terrible. Nowadays with modern codecs we can encode "higher-resolution" (like 320p or 480p) videos that are smaller in file size than the old postage stamp sized videos.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Yep, when divx hit the net and could compress (mangle?) a full length movie to fit on a single CD was a big deal. Before then there was VCD that used MPEG to split a movie across multiple CDs, iirc.
  - glandium 9y ago
    Usually 2 CDs, at lower resolution than DivX.

olivermarks 9y ago

Myst was huge and I was working 90 hours a week doing a cross platform CD ROM in 1995/96, using action script/ macromedia director, debabilizer for 256k color palettes and quicktime ui interction video snippets. It was a black art getting the disk to play on mac and pc - I had an in office ethernet network with mac and pc connected together. The product/project was obsolete a few years later. The big lesson for me was not to go down the cutting edge rat hole, problem solving and details ensnare you and you lose track of time and the market...

digi_owl 9y ago
Ugh, that reminds me of some cover CDs that used some fancy/horrible macromedia based menu if you didn't kill the autoplay "feature" with fire.

shaunxcode 9y ago

I managed to save up enough to get a plextor 8 speed cd writer. I started a record label with it!

agumonkey 9y ago
the stuff of legend. few days ago I saw a yamaha 24x writer in an electronic dump, it was a god of the second wave of improvements.. weird feeling, almost tempted to take it.

dawnerd 9y ago

Found a good series the other day on youtube about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoSTlUIxY7VkJLi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_D... The same channel also has some nice videos on CDs and VHS.

amatecha 9y ago

Ah, this article brings back some nice memories of Christmas in 1993 and receiving Myst as a gift[1]. I was dismayed it required a CD-ROM drive, which we didn't have... except... hey what's this other gift? Our family's first CD-ROM drive! It was a momentous occasion! Nowadays CD drives are basically thrift shop throwaways, but back then they cost $hundreds and you were lucky to read at 4x speed. Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced and it was easy to find huge libraries of neat new stuff to check out. Far more convenient than trying to download stuff at 1-2kB/sec over dialup! :'D [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/

ghaff 9y ago
Yeah. When CDs first came out for the PC, you could suddenly have all this neat digital stuff at your fingertips that was effectively not practical to download at any decent rate. You could also start getting photos scanned for the first time.
chiph 9y ago
> Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced So many AOL CDs in the mail... I think my first drive was a 2x Plextor internal SCSI that used the caddies. Pros: Never a scratched disc. Cons: You had to acquire & deal with caddies.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I recall running into a caddie drive once. Effectively it was used like a tray drive, with a removable tray...
- amatecha 9y ago
  Hey, before that was AOL floppies which were great -- free disks to use! Just put some scotch tape over the "write-protect" hole in the disk! hahaha :)

reitanqild 9y ago

BTW: anybody remembers Commodore CDTV? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV

rasz 9y ago
Who could forget Mehdis baby, useless and overpriced disaster. And how to recover? by doubling down with CD32!

reaperducer 9y ago

...and shortly thereafter, the built-in PC cupholder was born.