It's not weird at all! There was a brief window of time between CD-ROMs and multimedia capability becoming affordable and them becoming ubiquitous in the PC mar

It's not weird at all! There was a brief window of time between CD-ROMs and multimedia capability becoming affordable and them becoming ubiquitous in the PC market. During this time the "Multimedia PC" [1] standard / branding was introduced to differentiate PCs that had that capability. If you were an OEM PC builder back in the 90s on margins so thin they could only be detected using an electron microscope, you'd be looking for the cheapest way to qualify for yet another sticker on your beige box. Naturally you'd gravitate towards solutions that minimised your part count. So we got sound cards with CD-ROM interfaces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC