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I concur - the "multimedia" vision was that the CD-ROM would be used like a VCR to play tightly-controlled, packaged media with interactivity. Things like "inte

by chipsy 16y ago

I concur - the "multimedia" vision was that the CD-ROM would be used like a VCR to play tightly-controlled, packaged media with interactivity. Things like "interactive movies," animated books, and encyclopedias were often cited as the examples. And Windows would support this experience by making it as simple as turning on the computer and putting in the disc. In practice, of course, it never really worked that way. Games moved away from the interactive movie concept and instead would run an installer for 600+ MB of compressed content. The encyclopedias-on-CD and animated books had a window of about six or seven years before the Internet took over. And when CD burning took off in a big way in the late 90's, the image of the CD-ROM as a read-only medium was destroyed forever. The only place where Autorun might have concievably worked well is on the proprietary content formats(DVDs and audio CDs). Yet even there, most of the times I've put a CD or DVD in the computer, it's been to rip it, not to play it.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
Indeed. In practice hard drive space grew by leaps and bounds (as it always does) and within a few years it was practical to store several CDs worth of data. The historical norm had been to often run applications off of the original media (floppies or CDs), but this changed to fully installing to the hd once and then never using the original media again. This, of course, very much changed the nature of the benefit of autorun. Moreover, the explosion of the internet in the mid to late '90s began to transform the nature of computer usage. In large part the internet supplanted the CD-ROM as the primary point of entry for content into PCs. It's interesting how common it is for even software engineers to fail to anticipate the continuation of very well established technology trends.

by chipsy 16y ago

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Indeed. In practice hard drive space grew by leaps and bounds (as it always does) and within a few years it was practical to store several CDs worth of data. The historical norm had been to often run applications off of the original media (floppies or CDs), but this changed to fully installing to the hd once and then never using the original media again. This, of course, very much changed the nature of the benefit of autorun. Moreover, the explosion of the internet in the mid to late '90s began to transform the nature of computer usage. In large part the internet supplanted the CD-ROM as the primary point of entry for content into PCs. It's interesting how common it is for even software engineers to fail to anticipate the continuation of very well established technology trends.