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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 f
by 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
- bluedino 3y agoThe first CD-ROM connected to a computer that I ever remember was Grolier's (Compton's?) encyclopedia we had in the school library. It was a DOS program that ran on an IBM 286, external caddy-loading CD-ROM, and then a laser printer. Was probably an expensive and amazing setup at the time. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1308257334603337728 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1308257334603337728
- dfxm12 3y agoI remember thinking those cd caddies were so cool in concept, but after actually trying out a drive that needed the caddies, it was just so cumbersome.
- HPsquared 3y agoAh, downloading hundreds of MB on dial-up... those were the days