6 ms·

Understanding CD-R and CD-RW (2003) [pdf]

109 points by brudgers 4y ago

tpmx 4y ago
Raw CD-R and CR-RW's are actually still widely available for purchase. I wonder for how long though. Especially for CD-R that's an impressively long run of almost/about 30 years. Bought a bunch of CD-R's recently to burn some retro apps/games to get that proper feeling (sound, latency).
- u801e 4y ago
  They're still available, but I prefer getting writable discs with higher capacity, like DVD-R or BD-R. I still use my DVD-R as one of my offline backup methods (make an ISO, put a bunch of files and a sha256sum file on the disc).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NovaDudely 4y ago
  I still have a spindle of them kicking around mostly for legacy OS stuff like old PowerPC Mac installations. Some version of Open Firmware just do not play nice with USB's. The issue I have is think a lot of the discs I get are hyper aged and it is a flip of a coin if they actually work or not.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    Buy some fresh ones while you can.
    - NovaDudely 4y ago
      I will be honest I have kind of given up on trying to maintain a lot of these systems. Some I am still giving love but every year it gets a little harder, particularly with weird power supplies, dying capacitors and (now) odd ball storage systems. About 3 months ago I finally had to sacrifice a PowerMac G5 (Steve Jobs Folly as I called it), I kept the case and it is now a semi-sleeper PC but the original G5 board was dead as a dodo and not willing to go any further. The heat sinks on that thing was intense!
- gitfan86 4y ago
  That is amazing since thumb drives are much cheaper by the MB and less prone to degredation
  - tpmx 4y ago
    I'm guessing this product line is kept alive by outdated local government/municipality regulations or something along the lines of that. Oh, and owners of cars with CD players :). About now is probably the time to hoard.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      I needed my x-ray form the hospital, they gave me a CD. It actually kind of makes sence - they aren't gonna keep stacks of USB drives,.
      - userbinator 4y ago
        The fact that it's WORM media also makes sense for medical images, where you really don't want them to be editable.
        cancerhacker 4y ago
        My hospital distributed all my CT, PET and MRI imagery on DVD. When I had to travel cross country to a specialist, I'd ripped them all and brought a thumb drive - which the new hospital refused to deal with. I had to stay up all night burning a set of DVDs for them from the the iso images. (And even though I had them all available via dropbox - the hospital didn't allow access to the internet at large.)
        Uvix 4y ago
        Sounds like the hospital had their infosec well in hand. That's rare.
        4y ago
- jeron 4y ago
  Soon we will be able to recreate the entire feeling in VR, sound and latency included
- brudgers 4y ago
  As best I can tell from my recent interest, Verbatim is the only CD-RW name brand in the US market. [0] It may be the old Mitsubishi formulation and reliable. But the brand has changed hands over the years. CD-R’s are more widely available. [0] I acquired a Roland device from 2001 that is particular about CD-RW’s. No name disc’s don’t work in it but they format fine with a new external DVD burner…hence the rabbit hole that led to this submission.
  - dumbotron 4y ago
    Weren't CD+RWs considered the better format? Maybe this is just my experience with a first-gen xbox that makes me think this.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    Makes sense, I think Verbatim were also the last ones producing DVD-RAM. I still have a handful of their hardcoat ones, they are like using a big stable floppy disk, no need for any kind of burning software you can literally format them to any filesystem. CD-R's I bought a distributor case of Taiyo Yudens back in like the early-2000's, I have a few hundred left and use them in legacy stuff sometimes. They didn't get cd rot, all the CMC Magnetics CD-R disks (produced under many names) suffered cd rot within 10 years.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I hope for a while yet. My car has a 6 cd changer :-D
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    There's car stereos for literally under $15 shipped these days. I'm not exactly recommending those models, but car stereos are generally quite affordable and easy to install. Something to consider
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      They're usually garbage at that price point. The thing about a CD-changer though is that it usually guarantees that your existing system has a line-in for other devices. But sometimes the integration requires you to have a donor audio CD constantly playing even though you've spliced into the audio feed.
    - adanto6840 4y ago
      Do many cars still have a single height "head-unit" space available in them these days? My wife's 2017 Hyundai doesn't. The last car I had that could accommodate a 3rd party head-unit install was a 2004 Subaru, and it required buying manuf. replacement bevel for where the OEM clock went IIRC. Maybe latest car stereos are just entirely headless?
      - smackeyacky 4y ago
        Companies like scosche make plastics to adapt some cars, most popular older cars with cd players or changers would be able to be upgraded to a mechless head unit without too much hassle.
      - NikolaNovak 4y ago
        Modern cars all seem to have integrated units. Even before but LCDs were the norm, so that's not a sole excuse :-/ (fyi it is my 2004 wrx that has a double din cd changer. I go car shopping every year or two, and I stick with my trusty Scooby every time :)
sohkamyung 4y ago
I used to work for a consumer electronics company that made CDROM drives. Fun times, staring at eye diagrams on oscilloscopes to make sure the hardware was working. I remember one time an engineer was testing a 16x(?) CDROM drive, and the disc inside broke. That was a real mess. :-)
- yarg 4y ago
  Boom. https://youtu.be/zs7x1Hu29Wc?t=160 https://youtu.be/zs7x1Hu29Wc?t=160
- NovaDudely 4y ago
  16x doesn't seem like that much considering they routinely went up to 52x but I guess it is up to the quality of the discs being used. If it was a 16x DVD drive then that would probably explain it. Mostly unrelated. Now a slight pet peeve of mine was an episode of Mythbusters where they tackled the issue of exploding discs. The issue was the Adam took the data transfer rate of 7.2MB/sec and then extrapolated this to the inner disc area and came up with 30,000 RPM. About 3 times faster than what the discs actually spin at. So naturally discs start blowing up every time they ran the experiment. Adam assumed a constant linear when drives are actually constant angular. Drive spins, you get what ever data comes.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    wow, i'm trying to imagine how loud a 30,000 RPM CD-ROM drive would be. Did the constant angular confusion seem genuine like he just didn't know or more along the lines of it was much more compelling programming to conveniently ignore the fact?
  - hatsunearu 4y ago
    so it's 7.2MB/sec if your data is stored near the edge? Or is data stored "closer together" when it's in the inner track?
    - bityard 4y ago
      With the drive spinning at a particular constant RPM (which is what they do), then the data rate is the same no matter where you are reading the disc.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> What is Mount Rainier? > The Mount Rainier specification was developed in 2001 to provide the framework necessary for computer operating systems to seamlessly rewrite data CD-RW discs in a drag and drop fashion without the use of additional drivers or software. Through enhancements over the abilities of conventional packet writing software, including background formatting, recorder-based defect management, improved interchangeability and greater ease of use, Mount Rainier’s goal is to make 3.5” floppy diskettes obsolete by replacing them with CD-RW discs for everyday data storage and interchange. Guess it never caught on? I knew about UDF but not so sure about M.R. > Do some CD-R recording speeds produce better results than others? > Recorder and media manufacturers carefully tune their products to operate with each other across a wide range of speeds. As a result, equally high quality CDs are created when recording at almost all speeds. However, 1x presents a minor exception. Generally speaking, the physics and chemistry involved in the CD recording process seem to produce more consistent and readable marks in CD-R discs at 2x and greater speeds. !
- TylerE 4y ago
  It never did because USB keys became cheap and ubiquitous (and larger!) right around the same time.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Thanks, I was there million years ag^W^W^W. I've seen a couple of times when people used drag-n-drop for the batch writing, but that was because they were totally clueless about how you should write data on compact disks. *grin* > became cheap and ubiquitous yes > and larger! No. Refer to [0] for a remainder on how large and fast they were. And that is 2005. Sure, by 2008 anyone who wanted or needed could had a 8/16GB one, but between 2001 of the spec, 2003 of the doc and 2008 there are 5-7 years. NB I worked as L1+ tech at that time and I had a CD-R with Ghost'ed WinXP, specifically so I could install it on an ancient PCs without a DVD drive. By 2008 my tools were on a bootable thumbdrive and I no longer took a 30+ CD case with me on a regular basis. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/flash2005/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/flash2005/ I also like what they tested bundled software and reported how much memory those program use in the RAM.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
BTW a previous discussion on 'Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117813
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sn_master 4y ago
A year or so ago I made a post on reddit/TIL that referenced CD-R and it got deleted by a mod because "CD-R is not a known thing" or something like that. The mod must've been too young to ever used a CD-R. That was kind of shocking to me, but then I haven't used CD-R myself in almost a decade.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  A few years ago I mentioned a certain configuration needing a cross-over cable. Never heard of Auto MDI-X... I guess one can get through life using cross-over cables and straight cables where they used to be required, but you're going to cause confusion if you ask for a x-over cable at a shop.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  That is so perfectly Reddit.
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  There are reasons we are here and not on Reddit
  - fortran77 4y ago
    For insightful comments like yours!? I’m on both.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Reddit is (mostly) just bigger. There are parts that are worse but there are also parts that are much better.
    - SillyUsername 4y ago
      Reddit used to be like Hacker News, but as it became popular the memes started rolling in, and effectively lowered the IQ quotient and technology bias of the home page content and diluted the sub reddits. I looked back through archive.org a few years ago to anecdotally prove this theory to myself and yes, on the front page the factual content (in my personal opinion) as opposed to meme content seems to drop between 20-40% compared to more recently. The same seemed to happened to digg.com which made people move to reddit (remember that before it killed its user base?). I really hope this never happens to Hacker News...
nu11ptr 4y ago
I still recall very well how frustrating "buffer under-runs" were...in a day and an age when we really need a real-time OS, but we simply weren't running them. I can't decide if I love this doc or if it gives me post traumatic stress. This is another subject I haven't thought about in years as it has faded out, but having dealt with all the different permutations of CD writable I had forgotten just how many different variations there actually were, and how long the industry kept trying to improve the tech.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  I mean it wasn’t the biggest issue in the world once you know the root causes? If I was writing a ton of stuff I made sure to create an iso first so there’s not much of random files being searched for. And also learn your machines limits and write at a conservative speed..
  - orev 4y ago
    It was highly dependent on when you were doing this. There was a time very early on where even moving the mouse would cause it to skip. (also had the same issue playing MP2 (yes, 2) audio files). That was when we were really pushing the limits of the hardware (33MHz 486). These issues were resolved pretty quickly in the next generation of CPUs and recorders, so if you missed out on the very early versions you never would’ve seen this problem.
    - jwalton 4y ago
      Back when you needed a carrier to hold the CD-R on the drive.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      You had a CD writer on a 486 at 33 MHz ? Respect. I think they become common around win 98. (pentium, pentium 2 era).
  - mindslight 4y ago
    It was when you were using a defective Philips drive that underran regardless of the host, and blanks were $10 each. (perhaps my first experience with class action lawsuits. a coupon for $200 off another $400 drive, thanks!)
nailer 4y ago
I did my work experience (internship) at ‘computers click here’, for a week. I was 15 and super excited to work in a PC store. They had pentiums and command and conquer. The staff liked me and asked me to work a couple of extra days on the weekend for a big computer expo (maybe PCIT) so I became a fifteen year old salesperson, selling games and powerpoint 97 (rest of office wasn’t out yet). Rather than being paid in cash, we negotiated something better: a CD ROM! I think it was 8x. The sad part of the story is that after they gave me the CD ROM for working the weekend my Mum got a call from someone saying I stole it. Maybe someone didn’t have permission to give me it? I didn’t have to give it back in the end - i guess the manager spoke to the right person - but the false accusation still really hurts. It would have been a really happy story otherwise.
nigrioid 4y ago
I want 10TB optical media that costs $5 each.
- dumbotron 4y ago
  Honestly, I'd pay $50, maybe $100 for that.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  That would be something like LaserDisc with BluRay media LOL
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Or BDXL with 320 layers...
- tombert 4y ago
  It’s not optical, and it’s not “fast” in any traditional sense of the word, but LTO tapes can kind of approach what you’re suggesting. I’ve seen LTO-7 tapes sell for as low as $10 on eBay sometimes, and they advertise that you can get upwards of 15TB of storage if you enable compression. Granted, while the tapes are comparatively cheap, the tape drives very much are not…
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Trick is to stick to older LTO drives with U160 SCSI. Nobody wants them.
Tokkemon 4y ago
But of course, Alec from Technology Connections has us covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
I have never in my life seen a multi-volume disk. I have always wondered though; on Windows you could write to a CD-R but not finalize it. Could you delete the file? I'd test it as blank CDs are dirt cheap, but I don't have a writer...
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  With ISO9660 CD-Rs you can delete files from the index of a new session. However the original session is unaltered and software that exposed them allows access of deleted files.
- irdc 4y ago
  > I have never in my life seen a multi-volume disk. Some games (I personally only know of Total Annihilation from 1996) had both data and music (in the form of CD digital audio) on the same disc.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    Some movies also had a data section on DVD
  - WirelessGigabit 4y ago
    Oh so that is why I could put the Tomb Raider 2 disk in the CD drive and listen to the music!
initramfs 4y ago
For the record, I was able to record a CD-R at 1x (the only speed I trust) on a 486 SX2 processor, running at 33MHZ in the late 90s/early 00s, just to test whether I really needed a 233MHz Pentium II PC as advertised on most Best Buy CD-writer boxes. The write completed in about 50 minutes. Never stop dreaming. https://www.ebay.com/itm/183510730139 https://www.ebay.com/itm/183510730139
IYasha 4y ago
I wish there was a more in-depth PDF for DVD and Blu-ray. I found it really hard to follow the decoding process from light to user data. :(
- sohkamyung 4y ago
  The specification for Audio CDs is the "Red Book". The Internet Archive has a copy [1]. There should be similar standards for DVD and Blu-ray, but they should be based and enhancements of the Red Book since they have to be backward compatible with Audio CDs. For a slightly higher level look, try "Understanding and Servicing CD Players" by Ken Clements [2], which goes into some details on how CD players work to read data from CDs. [1] https://archive.org/details/RedBookAudioRecordingCompactDiscDigitalAudioSystemIEC60908SecondEdition199902ISBN2831846382/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/RedBookAudioRecordingCompactDisc... [2] https://archive.org/details/understandingandservicingcdplayers/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/understandingandservicingcdplaye...
therealmarv 4y ago
Still remember when I got one of the first CD-R drives in school (we funded it together with 2 other school mates). Required an expensive SCSI card (IDE drives came later) and that you do not touch the PC during a "burn" because that could potentially empty the buffer and you can throw away the CD-R blank. Got me kind of famous at the schoolyard to have a CD-R drive, mostly copying audio CDs.
- turbosepp 4y ago
  I can't forget the first home-copied CD I bought. It was GTA (1!) from "this one guy" in school that had a drive obviously. Payed 20 DM (german mark, about €10) for it, that was extremely pricey, haha. ...GTA did run best using the motorcycle on my 486 ;)

109 points by brudgers 4y ago

tpmx 4y ago

Raw CD-R and CR-RW's are actually still widely available for purchase. I wonder for how long though. Especially for CD-R that's an impressively long run of almost/about 30 years. Bought a bunch of CD-R's recently to burn some retro apps/games to get that proper feeling (sound, latency).

u801e 4y ago
They're still available, but I prefer getting writable discs with higher capacity, like DVD-R or BD-R. I still use my DVD-R as one of my offline backup methods (make an ISO, put a bunch of files and a sha256sum file on the disc).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
NovaDudely 4y ago
I still have a spindle of them kicking around mostly for legacy OS stuff like old PowerPC Mac installations. Some version of Open Firmware just do not play nice with USB's. The issue I have is think a lot of the discs I get are hyper aged and it is a flip of a coin if they actually work or not.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Buy some fresh ones while you can.
  - NovaDudely 4y ago
    I will be honest I have kind of given up on trying to maintain a lot of these systems. Some I am still giving love but every year it gets a little harder, particularly with weird power supplies, dying capacitors and (now) odd ball storage systems. About 3 months ago I finally had to sacrifice a PowerMac G5 (Steve Jobs Folly as I called it), I kept the case and it is now a semi-sleeper PC but the original G5 board was dead as a dodo and not willing to go any further. The heat sinks on that thing was intense!
gitfan86 4y ago
That is amazing since thumb drives are much cheaper by the MB and less prone to degredation
- tpmx 4y ago
  I'm guessing this product line is kept alive by outdated local government/municipality regulations or something along the lines of that. Oh, and owners of cars with CD players :). About now is probably the time to hoard.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    I needed my x-ray form the hospital, they gave me a CD. It actually kind of makes sence - they aren't gonna keep stacks of USB drives,.
    - userbinator 4y ago
      The fact that it's WORM media also makes sense for medical images, where you really don't want them to be editable.
      - cancerhacker 4y ago
        My hospital distributed all my CT, PET and MRI imagery on DVD. When I had to travel cross country to a specialist, I'd ripped them all and brought a thumb drive - which the new hospital refused to deal with. I had to stay up all night burning a set of DVDs for them from the the iso images. (And even though I had them all available via dropbox - the hospital didn't allow access to the internet at large.)
        Uvix 4y ago
        Sounds like the hospital had their infosec well in hand. That's rare.
        4y ago
jeron 4y ago
Soon we will be able to recreate the entire feeling in VR, sound and latency included
brudgers 4y ago
As best I can tell from my recent interest, Verbatim is the only CD-RW name brand in the US market. [0] It may be the old Mitsubishi formulation and reliable. But the brand has changed hands over the years. CD-R’s are more widely available. [0] I acquired a Roland device from 2001 that is particular about CD-RW’s. No name disc’s don’t work in it but they format fine with a new external DVD burner…hence the rabbit hole that led to this submission.
- dumbotron 4y ago
  Weren't CD+RWs considered the better format? Maybe this is just my experience with a first-gen xbox that makes me think this.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  Makes sense, I think Verbatim were also the last ones producing DVD-RAM. I still have a handful of their hardcoat ones, they are like using a big stable floppy disk, no need for any kind of burning software you can literally format them to any filesystem. CD-R's I bought a distributor case of Taiyo Yudens back in like the early-2000's, I have a few hundred left and use them in legacy stuff sometimes. They didn't get cd rot, all the CMC Magnetics CD-R disks (produced under many names) suffered cd rot within 10 years.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
I hope for a while yet. My car has a 6 cd changer :-D
- kristopolous 4y ago
  There's car stereos for literally under $15 shipped these days. I'm not exactly recommending those models, but car stereos are generally quite affordable and easy to install. Something to consider
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    They're usually garbage at that price point. The thing about a CD-changer though is that it usually guarantees that your existing system has a line-in for other devices. But sometimes the integration requires you to have a donor audio CD constantly playing even though you've spliced into the audio feed.
  - adanto6840 4y ago
    Do many cars still have a single height "head-unit" space available in them these days? My wife's 2017 Hyundai doesn't. The last car I had that could accommodate a 3rd party head-unit install was a 2004 Subaru, and it required buying manuf. replacement bevel for where the OEM clock went IIRC. Maybe latest car stereos are just entirely headless?
    - smackeyacky 4y ago
      Companies like scosche make plastics to adapt some cars, most popular older cars with cd players or changers would be able to be upgraded to a mechless head unit without too much hassle.
    - NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Modern cars all seem to have integrated units. Even before but LCDs were the norm, so that's not a sole excuse :-/ (fyi it is my 2004 wrx that has a double din cd changer. I go car shopping every year or two, and I stick with my trusty Scooby every time :)

sohkamyung 4y ago

I used to work for a consumer electronics company that made CDROM drives. Fun times, staring at eye diagrams on oscilloscopes to make sure the hardware was working. I remember one time an engineer was testing a 16x(?) CDROM drive, and the disc inside broke. That was a real mess. :-)

yarg 4y ago
Boom. https://youtu.be/zs7x1Hu29Wc?t=160 https://youtu.be/zs7x1Hu29Wc?t=160
NovaDudely 4y ago
16x doesn't seem like that much considering they routinely went up to 52x but I guess it is up to the quality of the discs being used. If it was a 16x DVD drive then that would probably explain it. Mostly unrelated. Now a slight pet peeve of mine was an episode of Mythbusters where they tackled the issue of exploding discs. The issue was the Adam took the data transfer rate of 7.2MB/sec and then extrapolated this to the inner disc area and came up with 30,000 RPM. About 3 times faster than what the discs actually spin at. So naturally discs start blowing up every time they ran the experiment. Adam assumed a constant linear when drives are actually constant angular. Drive spins, you get what ever data comes.
- dylan604 4y ago
  wow, i'm trying to imagine how loud a 30,000 RPM CD-ROM drive would be. Did the constant angular confusion seem genuine like he just didn't know or more along the lines of it was much more compelling programming to conveniently ignore the fact?
- hatsunearu 4y ago
  so it's 7.2MB/sec if your data is stored near the edge? Or is data stored "closer together" when it's in the inner track?
  - bityard 4y ago
    With the drive spinning at a particular constant RPM (which is what they do), then the data rate is the same no matter where you are reading the disc.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> What is Mount Rainier? > The Mount Rainier specification was developed in 2001 to provide the framework necessary for computer operating systems to seamlessly rewrite data CD-RW discs in a drag and drop fashion without the use of additional drivers or software. Through enhancements over the abilities of conventional packet writing software, including background formatting, recorder-based defect management, improved interchangeability and greater ease of use, Mount Rainier’s goal is to make 3.5” floppy diskettes obsolete by replacing them with CD-RW discs for everyday data storage and interchange. Guess it never caught on? I knew about UDF but not so sure about M.R. > Do some CD-R recording speeds produce better results than others? > Recorder and media manufacturers carefully tune their products to operate with each other across a wide range of speeds. As a result, equally high quality CDs are created when recording at almost all speeds. However, 1x presents a minor exception. Generally speaking, the physics and chemistry involved in the CD recording process seem to produce more consistent and readable marks in CD-R discs at 2x and greater speeds. !

TylerE 4y ago
It never did because USB keys became cheap and ubiquitous (and larger!) right around the same time.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  Thanks, I was there million years ag^W^W^W. I've seen a couple of times when people used drag-n-drop for the batch writing, but that was because they were totally clueless about how you should write data on compact disks. *grin* > became cheap and ubiquitous yes > and larger! No. Refer to [0] for a remainder on how large and fast they were. And that is 2005. Sure, by 2008 anyone who wanted or needed could had a 8/16GB one, but between 2001 of the spec, 2003 of the doc and 2008 there are 5-7 years. NB I worked as L1+ tech at that time and I had a CD-R with Ghost'ed WinXP, specifically so I could install it on an ancient PCs without a DVD drive. By 2008 my tools were on a bootable thumbdrive and I no longer took a 30+ CD case with me on a regular basis. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/flash2005/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/flash2005/ I also like what they tested bundled software and reported how much memory those program use in the RAM.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

BTW a previous discussion on 'Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117813

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sn_master 4y ago

A year or so ago I made a post on reddit/TIL that referenced CD-R and it got deleted by a mod because "CD-R is not a known thing" or something like that. The mod must've been too young to ever used a CD-R. That was kind of shocking to me, but then I haven't used CD-R myself in almost a decade.

Scoundreller 4y ago
A few years ago I mentioned a certain configuration needing a cross-over cable. Never heard of Auto MDI-X... I guess one can get through life using cross-over cables and straight cables where they used to be required, but you're going to cause confusion if you ask for a x-over cable at a shop.
Dalewyn 4y ago
That is so perfectly Reddit.
gymbeaux 4y ago
There are reasons we are here and not on Reddit
- fortran77 4y ago
  For insightful comments like yours!? I’m on both.
- flangola7 4y ago
  Reddit is (mostly) just bigger. There are parts that are worse but there are also parts that are much better.
  - SillyUsername 4y ago
    Reddit used to be like Hacker News, but as it became popular the memes started rolling in, and effectively lowered the IQ quotient and technology bias of the home page content and diluted the sub reddits. I looked back through archive.org a few years ago to anecdotally prove this theory to myself and yes, on the front page the factual content (in my personal opinion) as opposed to meme content seems to drop between 20-40% compared to more recently. The same seemed to happened to digg.com which made people move to reddit (remember that before it killed its user base?). I really hope this never happens to Hacker News...

nu11ptr 4y ago

I still recall very well how frustrating "buffer under-runs" were...in a day and an age when we really need a real-time OS, but we simply weren't running them. I can't decide if I love this doc or if it gives me post traumatic stress. This is another subject I haven't thought about in years as it has faded out, but having dealt with all the different permutations of CD writable I had forgotten just how many different variations there actually were, and how long the industry kept trying to improve the tech.

ramraj07 4y ago
I mean it wasn’t the biggest issue in the world once you know the root causes? If I was writing a ton of stuff I made sure to create an iso first so there’s not much of random files being searched for. And also learn your machines limits and write at a conservative speed..
- orev 4y ago
  It was highly dependent on when you were doing this. There was a time very early on where even moving the mouse would cause it to skip. (also had the same issue playing MP2 (yes, 2) audio files). That was when we were really pushing the limits of the hardware (33MHz 486). These issues were resolved pretty quickly in the next generation of CPUs and recorders, so if you missed out on the very early versions you never would’ve seen this problem.
  - jwalton 4y ago
    Back when you needed a carrier to hold the CD-R on the drive.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    You had a CD writer on a 486 at 33 MHz ? Respect. I think they become common around win 98. (pentium, pentium 2 era).
- mindslight 4y ago
  It was when you were using a defective Philips drive that underran regardless of the host, and blanks were $10 each. (perhaps my first experience with class action lawsuits. a coupon for $200 off another $400 drive, thanks!)

nailer 4y ago

I did my work experience (internship) at ‘computers click here’, for a week. I was 15 and super excited to work in a PC store. They had pentiums and command and conquer. The staff liked me and asked me to work a couple of extra days on the weekend for a big computer expo (maybe PCIT) so I became a fifteen year old salesperson, selling games and powerpoint 97 (rest of office wasn’t out yet). Rather than being paid in cash, we negotiated something better: a CD ROM! I think it was 8x. The sad part of the story is that after they gave me the CD ROM for working the weekend my Mum got a call from someone saying I stole it. Maybe someone didn’t have permission to give me it? I didn’t have to give it back in the end - i guess the manager spoke to the right person - but the false accusation still really hurts. It would have been a really happy story otherwise.

nigrioid 4y ago

I want 10TB optical media that costs $5 each.

dumbotron 4y ago
Honestly, I'd pay $50, maybe $100 for that.
orangepurple 4y ago
That would be something like LaserDisc with BluRay media LOL
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Or BDXL with 320 layers...
tombert 4y ago
It’s not optical, and it’s not “fast” in any traditional sense of the word, but LTO tapes can kind of approach what you’re suggesting. I’ve seen LTO-7 tapes sell for as low as $10 on eBay sometimes, and they advertise that you can get upwards of 15TB of storage if you enable compression. Granted, while the tapes are comparatively cheap, the tape drives very much are not…
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Trick is to stick to older LTO drives with U160 SCSI. Nobody wants them.

Tokkemon 4y ago

But of course, Alec from Technology Connections has us covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

I have never in my life seen a multi-volume disk. I have always wondered though; on Windows you could write to a CD-R but not finalize it. Could you delete the file? I'd test it as blank CDs are dirt cheap, but I don't have a writer...

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
With ISO9660 CD-Rs you can delete files from the index of a new session. However the original session is unaltered and software that exposed them allows access of deleted files.
irdc 4y ago
> I have never in my life seen a multi-volume disk. Some games (I personally only know of Total Annihilation from 1996) had both data and music (in the form of CD digital audio) on the same disc.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Some movies also had a data section on DVD
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  Oh so that is why I could put the Tomb Raider 2 disk in the CD drive and listen to the music!

initramfs 4y ago

For the record, I was able to record a CD-R at 1x (the only speed I trust) on a 486 SX2 processor, running at 33MHZ in the late 90s/early 00s, just to test whether I really needed a 233MHz Pentium II PC as advertised on most Best Buy CD-writer boxes. The write completed in about 50 minutes. Never stop dreaming. https://www.ebay.com/itm/183510730139 https://www.ebay.com/itm/183510730139

IYasha 4y ago

I wish there was a more in-depth PDF for DVD and Blu-ray. I found it really hard to follow the decoding process from light to user data. :(

sohkamyung 4y ago
The specification for Audio CDs is the "Red Book". The Internet Archive has a copy [1]. There should be similar standards for DVD and Blu-ray, but they should be based and enhancements of the Red Book since they have to be backward compatible with Audio CDs. For a slightly higher level look, try "Understanding and Servicing CD Players" by Ken Clements [2], which goes into some details on how CD players work to read data from CDs. [1] https://archive.org/details/RedBookAudioRecordingCompactDiscDigitalAudioSystemIEC60908SecondEdition199902ISBN2831846382/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/RedBookAudioRecordingCompactDisc... [2] https://archive.org/details/understandingandservicingcdplayers/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/understandingandservicingcdplaye...

therealmarv 4y ago

Still remember when I got one of the first CD-R drives in school (we funded it together with 2 other school mates). Required an expensive SCSI card (IDE drives came later) and that you do not touch the PC during a "burn" because that could potentially empty the buffer and you can throw away the CD-R blank. Got me kind of famous at the schoolyard to have a CD-R drive, mostly copying audio CDs.

turbosepp 4y ago
I can't forget the first home-copied CD I bought. It was GTA (1!) from "this one guy" in school that had a drive obviously. Payed 20 DM (german mark, about €10) for it, that was extremely pricey, haha. ...GTA did run best using the motorcycle on my 486 ;)