7 ms·

I still feel awe at the compact disc. When I was a teenager in the mid – late 90s, scanning microscopic pits with a freaking laser beam, and storing hundreds of

I still feel awe at the compact disc. When I was a teenager in the mid – late 90s, scanning microscopic pits with a freaking laser beam, and storing hundreds of megabytes on a storage medium, still seemed like a big deal, real cutting edge stuff. And yet that format had been invented well over a decade before. I’m also surprised that if the CD was already invented by the early 1980s and widely sold commercially for music, it took until the early 1990s for applications in computing with CD-ROM. Was the bottleneck here CPUs, RAM, and graphics cards, which would not have been able to handle the amount of data that a CD-ROM could store?

ben7799 3y ago
I think some older than me may remember differently, but I'm slightly older than you and I'd actually say I think for people who could afford computers there weren't that many years between getting their first CD-ROM equipped computer and their first CD Audio player. It was within a year or two in my family, and my father was in the computer/internet industry by the mid-80s so had access to stuff pretty early. I think we got our first CD audio player in the family in 1990 and got a 486 with a CD-rom drive in late 1992. CD Audio was expensive at first too.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
To me, CDRW was the thing that changed everything... yeah sure, i could burn a CD some time before that too, but every file, every video, song, etc., was measured literally in money for blank CDs, and it was relatively expensive. CDRW? 2MB file? Meh, just burn it, lend it to a friend, get it back, erase, 50meg file, other friend, get some other random stuff back, etc. Then flash storage became cheap and the CDs slowly died (well, there were iomega zips and other stuff in between, but not really that popular).
- francoisdevlin 3y ago
  I had a zip disk for all my work in college. It's completely impractical for anything these days, but it was so much fun. Having 100mb in your bag in the era of floppies made you feel like a king.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    There two dead end technologies of the 1990s that combined magnetism and lasers in different ways. That ZIP disc was a "floptical" disk that worked basically like a floppy but used a laser to read grooves on the disc that improved alignment and let them pack tracks in denser. There also were "magneto-optical" discs that would use a laser to heat a spot on a disc and allow recording spots much smaller than the magnetic head. It could read out finer too because the laser could read the magnetic fields with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect Some examples of those were the MO drive on the NEXT cube and Sony's mini-discs for music which I think are fun to collect but I had the laser burn out on my portable which can write tracks with metadata out of my PC and gotta either find another one with a working laser or settle for recording on my big decks without metadata.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 3y ago
The first time I head sampled digital audio on a computer was on a Sun 3 workstation circa 1990 which had a high end 68k micro processor. It was a clip from "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TngViNw2pOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TngViNw2pOo which is featured in this television commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGWW8KOQio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGWW8KOQio and got somebody in the computer lab to ask "Hey man, is that Freedom Rock?" The thing was that computer progress was frozen in midair for a time in the early 1980s; computers like the TRS-80, Apple ][, C-64 and game consoles like the Atari 2600 all outlasted the projections of their makers because all of the parts from software to the CPU to video system (e.g. the CPU clock was usually slaved to the video refresh of NTSC television) were tightly coupled and making any substantial improvements would mean dumping everything and starting over, particularly with all new software because you didn't have real operating systems back then. It was by the late 1980s, when the PC AT clones were established that you could really buy a computer one year that was a lot better than last year's model because architectures had advanced to the point where they could do that and keep compatibility. So processing PCM audio went from impossible to difficult to easy to trivial and video was not far behind. The free ride of clock rates going up and power consumption going down didn't stop until 2005, but each die shrink kept resulting in cheaper transistors until... just about now. It's not accidental at all that enthusiasts are complaining that NVIDIA 40-series GPUs aren't more cost effective than 30-series GPUs or simply greed; the economic engine of Moore's Law is dead, international competition and dirigisme might lead to another generation or two more than the free market would have delivered on its own. We've had a long time of getting better performance through more cores, wider SIMD, specialized architectures, etc. but it's going to take something big like true 3-d integration, semiconductors past silicon, or superconducting logic gates for performance to improve... Or maybe the revolution will be in "doing more with less".
pgeorgi 3y ago
Pressing CDs was expensive, which worked for the audio mass market, but not for the PC niche market. That limited the appeal of buying an (expensive) CD drive, and they weren't even using a standard protocol (so: lots of issues). When CD creation became cheaper and the market grew, the economies started to work out in the mid-90s, until the late-90s saw computer mags with cover-CDs (a signal that everybody in that market had CD drives, and pressing CDs was cheap enough for one-off low-count productions like that)
actionfromafar 3y ago
I think it was just too much data for (cheap) digital tech at the time, and the fact that Laserdisc games makers chose analogue LaserDisc over something digital on a CD is an indication.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  Because LaserDisc could hold high quality video?
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Yes, that, but also that it was easier and cheaper to master and control an analogue signal than pushing that much video and sound data digitally through a computer.
    - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      You could store and playback video from a CD … it looked like crap though. The best computers could handle back then was MPEG-1 video which it was really really blocky at CD bit rates. Double whammy of lack of storage and lack of processing power. Things finally got good enough with DVD that had 7x-13x the storage and MPEG-2 was available.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        The CD came a decade before MPEG-1, though.
      - CharlesW 3y ago
        > The best computers could handle back then was MPEG-1 video… Fun fact: MPEG-1 decode needed enough horsepower that software decode implementations shipped several years after popular-for-CD-ROM video formats like Cinepak¹. The timeline: Cinepak shipped as part of QuickTime in 1992. Myst (a very popular CD-ROM title which used Cinepak) shipped in 1993. Apple shipped their MPEG-1 QuickTime extension (PowerPC-only) in 1997. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinepak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinepak
thedougd 3y ago
My first CD-ROM drive used a printer parallel port. It worked well enough to run my first CD-ROM software purchase, Mad Dog McCree (1993). My PC was a microchannel PS/2 and it was difficult finding reasonably priced accessories.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
MPC standard gives a hint: The first MPC minimum standard, set in 1991, was: 16 MHz 386SX CPU 2 MB RAM 30 MB hard disk 256-color, 640×480 VGA video card 1× (single speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with < 1 second seek time Sound card (Creative Sound Blaster recommended as closest available to standard at the time[2]) outputting 22 kHz, 8-bit sound; and inputting 11 kHz, 8-bit sound Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions. Though for a CD game you really wanted something in range of DX4/100 with 16MB RAM, which surpasses MPC-II specs. Also 4 incompatible CD interfaces on the sound cards doesn't bode well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mozart_16_(Oak_OTI601).png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mozart_16_(Oak_OTI60...
- ben7799 3y ago
  I think most people didn't get a CD-ROM drive till the 486 was common. 386s did not come with CDs till late in their lifetime, by the time the 486 was becoming affordable most computers had a CD-ROM drive.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > Also 4 incompatible CD interfaces on the sound cards doesn't bode well. Yeah, certainly in the beginning CD-ROM drives were marketed as a cornerstone to bring PC's into the "multimedia" age. And thus eg. bundled with an audio card that doubled as a CD drive controller. Only when they were more common, things like OSes, office suites etc came on CD by default. Oh and... encyclopedia. :-)
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > bring PC's into the "multimedia" age Yep, office drones don't need this fancy-shmancy multimeedeeaa => no sound card => no CD interface. Only when ATAPI became the standard (and MultiI/O became integrated) the support for the CD drives come to systems without a soundcard. > Oh and... encyclopedia. :-) That's multimedia.
    - 3y ago
RetroTechie 3y ago
CD drives were expensive at first. That, and a mismatch between the huge capacity of a CD, and typical software back then. Remember, popular games like Doom fitted on a couple of 3.5" floppies. 3D graphics was just coming. PC's with the cpu to process many MB's of game data (or decode full screen video) were often business machines with limited graphics capabilities. Homecomputers like the Amiga or Atari ST were in similar price range as a CD drive. Harddisks were like 1 or 2 GB. CD writers were much more expensive. So out of most people's reach as backup medium. Only when prices came down and PC's gained in cpu, storage & graphics (and software ballooned with that), it made sense to add a CD drive. I do kind of miss the days where you'd buy a magazine with cover CD, and spend weeks playing 100s of shareware games. Then buy the full box for the best-of those. Or try a Linux distro without needing to download 100s of MB's over a 33k modem. And it's a shame those mini-CD's (similar to GameCube discs) weren't more popular. I always liked those. Almost impossible to find these days (whether used for music, software, or as -R/RW media).
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > That, and a mismatch between the huge capacity of a CD, and typical software back then. Remember, popular games like Doom fitted on a couple of 3.5" floppies. 3D graphics was just coming. I think this is why encyclopedias were one of the first "killer applications" for CD-ROMs. Wikipedia didn't yet exist, paper encyclopedia sets cost several hundred dollars at least, and floppy disks weren't really big enough for it. Having a whole encyclopedia on one or two CDs was a game changer.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > was a game changer The game changer was multimedia encyclopedia. You can have a lot of text on compressed 3.5", but having a digital sound and video was the main selling point. An example of Encarta 94 video: https://youtu.be/mEySJkXezeg?t=500 https://youtu.be/mEySJkXezeg?t=500
    - js2 3y ago
      Two other multimedia examples: From Alice to Ocean: https://archive.org/details/CDAC-029000 https://archive.org/details/CDAC-029000 Myst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
derefr 3y ago
CPU IO access speed and memory transfer delay, in a world before the advent of DMA. There’s a reason that game consoles of the era had dedicated “Audio Processing Units” that rendered sound directly from sequencer instructions + a small set of loaded samples: trying to feed “one large continuous sample” (i.e. a raw PCM stream) through the CPU to a DAC, wouldn’t have left any time for doing actual logic. If you compressed the audio, decompressing it would take the whole CPU too. Sure, CD-ROMs weren’t usually continuous streams of data in the way that audio CDs were; but the kinds of stuff that couldn’t just be usefully fit into a floppy — or a set of floppies installed onto a hard drive! — was usually asset files that were individually large in the same way that PCM audio was individually large, in a way that would still choke either CPUs or RAM. No point in large image files you can’t even display. There were a few consumer use-cases for random access to individually large files — mostly public databases, of the kind we’d expect to find online today. But people who really needed these, either did use them “online” even back then (by dialing in directly to mainframe database services); or, if they were a more industrial consumer, they got these distributions on tape! These were the first things to be ported over to CD-ROM when CD-ROM drives did start becoming available. The whole “multimedia” hype took a bit longer, only really taking off once high-quality images and low-quality video were able to actually be displayed on PC (requiring PCs to first achieve display resolutions higher than 640x480; color depths higher than 256-color; at least 2MB of VRAM; and CPUs fast enough for MPEG1 decoding of at least small 100x100 video clips.)
- vel0city 3y ago
  Speaking to the processing needed just to pass the PCM data around being a massive fraction of the overall processing power, you'll notice in a lot of early CD-ROM games they just completely sidestep this and just use the CD drive to read actual CD audio off the disk and have it decode and play back the audio directly to the sound output device instead of going through the CPU. Essentially the computer would just tell the CD drive "play track 11" when you got to the 11th level of the game. And that was a decade past the creation of the audio CD that normal PCs (or gaming PCs!) still needed a lot of processing power just handling that data stream.

ben7799 3y ago

I think some older than me may remember differently, but I'm slightly older than you and I'd actually say I think for people who could afford computers there weren't that many years between getting their first CD-ROM equipped computer and their first CD Audio player. It was within a year or two in my family, and my father was in the computer/internet industry by the mid-80s so had access to stuff pretty early. I think we got our first CD audio player in the family in 1990 and got a 486 with a CD-rom drive in late 1992. CD Audio was expensive at first too.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

To me, CDRW was the thing that changed everything... yeah sure, i could burn a CD some time before that too, but every file, every video, song, etc., was measured literally in money for blank CDs, and it was relatively expensive. CDRW? 2MB file? Meh, just burn it, lend it to a friend, get it back, erase, 50meg file, other friend, get some other random stuff back, etc. Then flash storage became cheap and the CDs slowly died (well, there were iomega zips and other stuff in between, but not really that popular).

francoisdevlin 3y ago
I had a zip disk for all my work in college. It's completely impractical for anything these days, but it was so much fun. Having 100mb in your bag in the era of floppies made you feel like a king.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  There two dead end technologies of the 1990s that combined magnetism and lasers in different ways. That ZIP disc was a "floptical" disk that worked basically like a floppy but used a laser to read grooves on the disc that improved alignment and let them pack tracks in denser. There also were "magneto-optical" discs that would use a laser to heat a spot on a disc and allow recording spots much smaller than the magnetic head. It could read out finer too because the laser could read the magnetic fields with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect Some examples of those were the MO drive on the NEXT cube and Sony's mini-discs for music which I think are fun to collect but I had the laser burn out on my portable which can write tracks with metadata out of my PC and gotta either find another one with a working laser or settle for recording on my big decks without metadata.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 3y ago

The first time I head sampled digital audio on a computer was on a Sun 3 workstation circa 1990 which had a high end 68k micro processor. It was a clip from "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TngViNw2pOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TngViNw2pOo which is featured in this television commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGWW8KOQio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eGWW8KOQio and got somebody in the computer lab to ask "Hey man, is that Freedom Rock?" The thing was that computer progress was frozen in midair for a time in the early 1980s; computers like the TRS-80, Apple ][, C-64 and game consoles like the Atari 2600 all outlasted the projections of their makers because all of the parts from software to the CPU to video system (e.g. the CPU clock was usually slaved to the video refresh of NTSC television) were tightly coupled and making any substantial improvements would mean dumping everything and starting over, particularly with all new software because you didn't have real operating systems back then. It was by the late 1980s, when the PC AT clones were established that you could really buy a computer one year that was a lot better than last year's model because architectures had advanced to the point where they could do that and keep compatibility. So processing PCM audio went from impossible to difficult to easy to trivial and video was not far behind. The free ride of clock rates going up and power consumption going down didn't stop until 2005, but each die shrink kept resulting in cheaper transistors until... just about now. It's not accidental at all that enthusiasts are complaining that NVIDIA 40-series GPUs aren't more cost effective than 30-series GPUs or simply greed; the economic engine of Moore's Law is dead, international competition and dirigisme might lead to another generation or two more than the free market would have delivered on its own. We've had a long time of getting better performance through more cores, wider SIMD, specialized architectures, etc. but it's going to take something big like true 3-d integration, semiconductors past silicon, or superconducting logic gates for performance to improve... Or maybe the revolution will be in "doing more with less".

pgeorgi 3y ago

Pressing CDs was expensive, which worked for the audio mass market, but not for the PC niche market. That limited the appeal of buying an (expensive) CD drive, and they weren't even using a standard protocol (so: lots of issues). When CD creation became cheaper and the market grew, the economies started to work out in the mid-90s, until the late-90s saw computer mags with cover-CDs (a signal that everybody in that market had CD drives, and pressing CDs was cheap enough for one-off low-count productions like that)

actionfromafar 3y ago

I think it was just too much data for (cheap) digital tech at the time, and the fact that Laserdisc games makers chose analogue LaserDisc over something digital on a CD is an indication.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
Because LaserDisc could hold high quality video?
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Yes, that, but also that it was easier and cheaper to master and control an analogue signal than pushing that much video and sound data digitally through a computer.
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    You could store and playback video from a CD … it looked like crap though. The best computers could handle back then was MPEG-1 video which it was really really blocky at CD bit rates. Double whammy of lack of storage and lack of processing power. Things finally got good enough with DVD that had 7x-13x the storage and MPEG-2 was available.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      The CD came a decade before MPEG-1, though.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > The best computers could handle back then was MPEG-1 video… Fun fact: MPEG-1 decode needed enough horsepower that software decode implementations shipped several years after popular-for-CD-ROM video formats like Cinepak¹. The timeline: Cinepak shipped as part of QuickTime in 1992. Myst (a very popular CD-ROM title which used Cinepak) shipped in 1993. Apple shipped their MPEG-1 QuickTime extension (PowerPC-only) in 1997. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinepak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinepak

thedougd 3y ago

My first CD-ROM drive used a printer parallel port. It worked well enough to run my first CD-ROM software purchase, Mad Dog McCree (1993). My PC was a microchannel PS/2 and it was difficult finding reasonably priced accessories.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

MPC standard gives a hint: The first MPC minimum standard, set in 1991, was: 16 MHz 386SX CPU 2 MB RAM 30 MB hard disk 256-color, 640×480 VGA video card 1× (single speed) CD-ROM drive using no more than 40% of CPU to read, with < 1 second seek time Sound card (Creative Sound Blaster recommended as closest available to standard at the time[2]) outputting 22 kHz, 8-bit sound; and inputting 11 kHz, 8-bit sound Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions. Though for a CD game you really wanted something in range of DX4/100 with 16MB RAM, which surpasses MPC-II specs. Also 4 incompatible CD interfaces on the sound cards doesn't bode well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mozart_16_(Oak_OTI601).png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mozart_16_(Oak_OTI60...

ben7799 3y ago
I think most people didn't get a CD-ROM drive till the 486 was common. 386s did not come with CDs till late in their lifetime, by the time the 486 was becoming affordable most computers had a CD-ROM drive.
RetroTechie 3y ago
> Also 4 incompatible CD interfaces on the sound cards doesn't bode well. Yeah, certainly in the beginning CD-ROM drives were marketed as a cornerstone to bring PC's into the "multimedia" age. And thus eg. bundled with an audio card that doubled as a CD drive controller. Only when they were more common, things like OSes, office suites etc came on CD by default. Oh and... encyclopedia. :-)
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > bring PC's into the "multimedia" age Yep, office drones don't need this fancy-shmancy multimeedeeaa => no sound card => no CD interface. Only when ATAPI became the standard (and MultiI/O became integrated) the support for the CD drives come to systems without a soundcard. > Oh and... encyclopedia. :-) That's multimedia.
  - 3y ago

RetroTechie 3y ago

CD drives were expensive at first. That, and a mismatch between the huge capacity of a CD, and typical software back then. Remember, popular games like Doom fitted on a couple of 3.5" floppies. 3D graphics was just coming. PC's with the cpu to process many MB's of game data (or decode full screen video) were often business machines with limited graphics capabilities. Homecomputers like the Amiga or Atari ST were in similar price range as a CD drive. Harddisks were like 1 or 2 GB. CD writers were much more expensive. So out of most people's reach as backup medium. Only when prices came down and PC's gained in cpu, storage & graphics (and software ballooned with that), it made sense to add a CD drive. I do kind of miss the days where you'd buy a magazine with cover CD, and spend weeks playing 100s of shareware games. Then buy the full box for the best-of those. Or try a Linux distro without needing to download 100s of MB's over a 33k modem. And it's a shame those mini-CD's (similar to GameCube discs) weren't more popular. I always liked those. Almost impossible to find these days (whether used for music, software, or as -R/RW media).

mcpackieh 3y ago
> That, and a mismatch between the huge capacity of a CD, and typical software back then. Remember, popular games like Doom fitted on a couple of 3.5" floppies. 3D graphics was just coming. I think this is why encyclopedias were one of the first "killer applications" for CD-ROMs. Wikipedia didn't yet exist, paper encyclopedia sets cost several hundred dollars at least, and floppy disks weren't really big enough for it. Having a whole encyclopedia on one or two CDs was a game changer.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > was a game changer The game changer was multimedia encyclopedia. You can have a lot of text on compressed 3.5", but having a digital sound and video was the main selling point. An example of Encarta 94 video: https://youtu.be/mEySJkXezeg?t=500 https://youtu.be/mEySJkXezeg?t=500
  - js2 3y ago
    Two other multimedia examples: From Alice to Ocean: https://archive.org/details/CDAC-029000 https://archive.org/details/CDAC-029000 Myst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

derefr 3y ago

CPU IO access speed and memory transfer delay, in a world before the advent of DMA. There’s a reason that game consoles of the era had dedicated “Audio Processing Units” that rendered sound directly from sequencer instructions + a small set of loaded samples: trying to feed “one large continuous sample” (i.e. a raw PCM stream) through the CPU to a DAC, wouldn’t have left any time for doing actual logic. If you compressed the audio, decompressing it would take the whole CPU too. Sure, CD-ROMs weren’t usually continuous streams of data in the way that audio CDs were; but the kinds of stuff that couldn’t just be usefully fit into a floppy — or a set of floppies installed onto a hard drive! — was usually asset files that were individually large in the same way that PCM audio was individually large, in a way that would still choke either CPUs or RAM. No point in large image files you can’t even display. There were a few consumer use-cases for random access to individually large files — mostly public databases, of the kind we’d expect to find online today. But people who really needed these, either did use them “online” even back then (by dialing in directly to mainframe database services); or, if they were a more industrial consumer, they got these distributions on tape! These were the first things to be ported over to CD-ROM when CD-ROM drives did start becoming available. The whole “multimedia” hype took a bit longer, only really taking off once high-quality images and low-quality video were able to actually be displayed on PC (requiring PCs to first achieve display resolutions higher than 640x480; color depths higher than 256-color; at least 2MB of VRAM; and CPUs fast enough for MPEG1 decoding of at least small 100x100 video clips.)

vel0city 3y ago
Speaking to the processing needed just to pass the PCM data around being a massive fraction of the overall processing power, you'll notice in a lot of early CD-ROM games they just completely sidestep this and just use the CD drive to read actual CD audio off the disk and have it decode and play back the audio directly to the sound output device instead of going through the CPU. Essentially the computer would just tell the CD drive "play track 11" when you got to the 11th level of the game. And that was a decade past the creation of the audio CD that normal PCs (or gaming PCs!) still needed a lot of processing power just handling that data stream.