There were plenty of cool oddities back then. I had a CD-ROM drive which had a full set of playback and volume controls, a headphone jack, and an IR receiver fo

There were plenty of cool oddities back then. I had a CD-ROM drive which had a full set of playback and volume controls, a headphone jack, and an IR receiver for the associated remote control. Since back then most CD-ROM drives also had an analog audio path directly to the sound card (through a separate thin cable), you could play a music CD without involving the operating system other than to adjust the master volume (though the operating system could also control the playback if it desired). Nowadays it's all gotten boring, all we can do is rip the digital audio data through the operating system and write it to the sound card.