15 ms·

The short, happy reign of CD-ROM

153 points by ecliptik 2y ago

rideontime 2y ago
Like many other commenters here, I, too, used CD-ROMs in the 90s.
duxup 2y ago
I miss putting in a disk, hearing the drive spin up, my computer coming to life and working away. Now I open a program, it reaches out to the internet, maybe I get some crappy spinner that is intermittently doing a thing, it's an inconstant experience. Content provided is of course faster and there's incalculably more information available. But that process / time of loading up a big CD felt so good compared to the current experience. I work on web apps and no amount of work ever seems to provide the positive feedback / loading experience of a CD-ROM. There's just no spinner or progress bar that seems that direct or satisfying.
- moomoo11 2y ago
  Make all your website spinners CD ROMs and play an audio of the spinning up sound.
  - recursive 2y ago
    It's not the full effect. I remember feeling the torque impulse through the desk.
    - acidburnNSA 2y ago
      We could make little USB gyros that simulate that.
    - myself248 2y ago
      Oh yeah, holding a spinning Discman you could notice the gyroscopic force; don't pivot it too fast or it'll precess beyond the suspension's compliance and scrape the edge of the disc! And that was only spinning at 1x; later faster data drives were weirdly powerful. I had a little experience with a 24x drive in a laptop and you didn't dare move it while the disc was spinning. Thankfully they never went faster than that in portables; a 48x slimline would've been dangerous.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Walking past computers in Starfield you hear them making hard drive noises and I realized I miss that. It's great how quiet computers are now, but there was something to being able to hear the computer thinking too.
  - ajuc 2y ago
    I remember I could recognize the sound floppy disk drives made when they encountered read error, so I knew before the error message appeared that I had to go copy the floppy again :)
    - myself248 2y ago
      Combine that with the speakers picking up a GSM call setup sequence before the phone actually rang, and you were pretty much clairvoyant.
  - jodrellblank 2y ago
    Here, put this on in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0
  - andruby 2y ago
    I'm glad I grew up hearing floppy disks, hard drives seek, cd drives spin and most importantly, a modem establish a connection. Silence is nice too though.
    - Loughla 2y ago
      Honestly, all the silence has made me more wary of computer temperatures. I never used to be able to hear the fans, but now that everything is solid state, they're the one constant. And it worries me occasionally when they kick on for no discernable reason.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
      That modem sequence is probably one of the most memorable pieces of a whole generation's childhood. If you ask me now, when it's been over two decades since I've heard it, I would easily be able to badly reproduce the whole 30 second soundbite with my voice from memory. With confidence I could probably nail every single beep and boop including the pauses between them and the odd static sound near the end of the whole process.
- thih9 2y ago
  > Now I open a program, it reaches out to the internet, maybe I get some crappy spinner that is intermittently doing a thing Yes, that’s unfortunate. Offline physical drives still exist in some areas; I keep my nintendo switch mostly in airplane mode and use cartridges. SD card slot made a surprising return to Macbook Pros. Even CDs have their direct successors, e.g. M-Discs[1] are popular for long term data storage. But yes, none of that exists in the realm of web apps. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Same. There's a human need for sensations / stimulations / details that made the pre-digital era very satisfying and touching. Last time I booted a pentium box, to fix an old tape drive I was staggered by how lovely that old device felt. The led, the smooth motor hiss, the read patterns. Felt so cool even in the era of nvme ssd.
  - nayuki 2y ago
    Compact Discs are digital.
    - agumonkey 2y ago
      the electromechanical device reading them is not
      - nayuki 2y ago
        It's not like network cables (physical objects) and radio waves (physical phenomena) are digital either.
        agumonkey 2y ago
        we were discussing the supporting devices of that era, not the underlying principles
- aunty_helen 2y ago
  And then when you get a small scratch and you hear the drive constantly trying to seek until it gives up… absolute bliss.
- gregmac 2y ago
  In the 90s I ran a dial-up BBS, and at some point, I had acquired a 4-CD changer. It was equally satisfying to hear it randomly come to life changing disks as someone had logged on to download something.
  - jasonfarnon 2y ago
    Did you have a pretty static download section? Or were you constantly burning new CDs? I vaguely remember Sysops mentioning CD changers in their advertisements.
    - loloquwowndueo 2y ago
      What do you mean? Do you have any idea how long it would take people to download even a fraction of a single CD’s 650MB at 9600 bps at best? My bbs probably switched CDs every 6 months.
    - gregmac 2y ago
      Fairly static, but I'd cycle the CDs every few months. Even in the 28.8K modem era, people didn't suck down everything they could, partly due to time, partly due to storage space (eg: the reason I used CDs instead of big drives is because big drives were very expensive), so the life of these was pretty long. The software was also not rapidly changing, probably because distribution was harder (so: get it right the first time), and also partly because it was mostly for offline use (no network, servers, etc to stay in sync with or worry about remote vulnerabilities from).
- neom 2y ago
  This was also extremely satisfying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCe6xnxdN1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCe6xnxdN1Y
  - Arrath 2y ago
    Ah, the noise that preceded a great number of Starcraft matches.
    - nickpeterson 2y ago
      I’m going to wall the ramp with a depot and a barracks then drop tanks on their ledge, you take your natural and pump hydras. These guys don’t know what’s up.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Oh. So that's what those noises were. I actually learned a thing today.
    - neom 2y ago
      That channel also has one on if they fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnvBxYKDlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnvBxYKDlc
    - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
      I might interest you in the museum of endangered sounds… http://savethesounds.info/ http://savethesounds.info/
  - nayuki 2y ago
    Related: https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/soundofmodems/index.htm https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/soundofmodems/index.htm https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-collection-of-v-90v-92-modem-sounds/ https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-colle...
- lxgr 2y ago
  I really don't miss the disastrous random access latency of optical media, nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever (or a friend doing the same to a game I'd lent them). But what they definitely had going for them is that they were dirt cheap. Nobody thought twice to burn a CD with some photos for their friends; USB thumb drives are of course much faster and higher capacity, but also not something you'd gladly part with several times a month. Another big advantage that media-based software (like console video games) had in pre-Internet times was that it was mostly self-contained. These days, consoles might still support physical media, but they serves more as DRM authentication tokens; once you insert a disk or cartridge, it's minutes of installation to hard disk and potentially hours of fetching updates from the Internet. That's really less of a feature of disks though, and more about the practical inability to patch software once it was shipped. That definitely made QA a lot more thorough than it is today.
  - tkiolp4 2y ago
    > I really don't miss the disastrous random access latency of optical media, nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever (or a friend doing the same to a game I'd lent them). I’m the opposite. What I fear is the dozens of content providers (YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc.) suddenly removing or blocking access to their content. I keep a local copy of everything I can.
    - jasonfarnon 2y ago
      But I think of CDs as the start of this era of transience. Every single CD I burned was useless after a couple of years of sitting in a spindle. Most of my 3.5" floppies from the 90s still work fine, with maybe a few bad sectors. I don't know, maybe I bought cheap CDs to start with--I think the factory burned non-writable CDs lasted.
      - lxgr 2y ago
        "Prerecorded" CDs are actually not "burned" by a laser (in the way that CD-Rs are) in the factory, but "stamped"/injection molded from a negative. It's a completely different process! Since there is no photosensitive dye involved on the final prerecorded disc, this makes them orders of magnitude more durable. That dye is what breaks down over time on CD-Rs, making them unreadable.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > I miss putting in a disk, hearing the drive spin up, my computer coming to life and working away. I still use optical media once in a while. I've got quite a collection of readers, stacked on a shelf in the garage. And a few discs with data on them and a stash of empty discs waiting to be burned. If you miss it, just buy an external Blu-ray writer. 25 to, what, 100 GB per disk is not too bad for the really important stuff. They're not mutually exclusive with other forms of backups.
- will1am 2y ago
  Physical media reminds us of an earlier era of computing and it was exciting
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I use optical discs sometimes, including for backups (I think the use of WORM media for making backup copies is beneficial). There is also benefit of locally stored data. You can store them in hard drive, although sometimes external media can be helpful too, rather than needing to use internet for any transfers.
- oopsallmagic 2y ago
  I miss actually owning software that couldn't be rewritten or revoked at any given time.
- verelo 2y ago
  This reminds me of things my dad says about his old Chrysler Valiant, “i love turning the car over, adjusting the choke, and hearing it catch on a cold winters morning”. To me it was just inconvenient, and to him too, but now he looks back at it as something to envy. I guess the electric car is the internet and the valiant is the cd rom? Although the valiant was more of a steam train to me haha.
- fukawi2 2y ago
  I remember as a kid loading up the Encarta95 CD on the family 486, and the anticipation of what I could discover in the seemingly endless world of information that little spinning silver disc held within. There is no contemporaneous equivalent.
  - latentsea 2y ago
    I remember playing that game that was within Encarta where you would move between different rooms.
  - massysett 2y ago
    Encarta paid for licensed content too, so it had nice audio clips of, say, Malcolm X speaking. Wikipedia is of course much more expansive in content, but since it all has to be Free, in some ways it doesn’t match what Encarta had.
- ngcazz 2y ago
  Unless you had one of those Matsushita drives that came bundled with the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0. they definitely didn't last...
neilv 2y ago
While spring-cleaning tech cruft recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many CD-ROMs now have eBay value, even ones that you'd think no one would ever want anymore. (In the US, I assume a shipping cost of $4.13 Media Mail, with whatever eBay discount. And I can tape together a mailer of corrugated cardboard cut from an Amazon box. Plan to net $10+ after postage and eBay's cut, value your time at 0, and a box of old CD-ROMs adds up.)
tiltowait 2y ago
I question some of the figures in this article. It’s hard to believe 1994 is “peak CD”. I’d have expected that to be 1998-9. The PS1 didn’t come out until 1995 and must have represented a huge boost to both CDs and drives sold. The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.
- bombcar 2y ago
  1994 was when the CD felt peak, even though it grew in popularity later. 1994 was still solidly in the floppy era, and getting a CD-ROM was huge, even larger than some hard drives at the time. If you had a CD-ROM drive in 1994, you were king.
  - pak9rabid 2y ago
    Quad Speed! ;)
    - bombcar 2y ago
      It was later but we got a Kenwood True-X 72x and that thing was a beast!
      - keyneus 2y ago
        I remember upgrading from a 4x to 24x, and being excited for the much faster data transfer rate. What I didn't anticipate was the fact that it sounded like a jet taking off when it spun that fast! I figured out how to ratchet it down to 4x and kept it there unless I knew I'd need a fast sustained rate for something like copying hundreds of megs. It wasn't worth the noise for smaller transfers.
  - will1am 2y ago
    Paarticularly in the context of both gaming and music
  - jasonfarnon 2y ago
    if you're excluding "peak of popularity" what is it the "peak" of?
WillAdams 2y ago
I really miss the innovation/energy of this time frame --- things such as Microsoft's Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM: https://www.old-games.com/download/3304/leonardo-da-vinci https://www.old-games.com/download/3304/leonardo-da-vinci were amazing, and a great way to encourage learning and exploration of knowledge for children. I guess this sort of thing is done as apps now, but it doesn't quite seem the same --- not sure why.
- biofox 2y ago
  As a kid in the 90s, Encarta was pure magic to me.
moth-fuzz 2y ago
The thing that I miss mainly about CDs and floppies and even SD cards to an extent is that they were actually integrated into the machine itself. Modern removable storage solutions just use the Universal Serial Bus, and could look like anything, and have no specified shape or size, and stick out of the machine. CDs, floppies, and SDs slide nicely into a dedicated opening, and go all the way in. They’re nicely stackable and sortable. You can even write on them for quick labeling. Very user friendly.
draazon 2y ago
I’m somewhat surprised that the article doesn’t mention Robert Winter’s “The Interactive Beethoven”. I kept an old ThinkPad running for a long time after it should have been obsoleted, just so that I could spin up that disc. Amazing sound quality, great use of hypermedia… a real CD-ROM showpiece.
pbj1968 2y ago
Made a “lot” of money (for a teenager) installing cd rom drives into computers in the 90s. The article isn’t lying - everyone I knew was buying them circa 1994 with no idea how to install them. I remember the first high speed one I installed… vibrated the entire desk. Now I’m buying them for $12 shipped off eBay and using usb to power them. Only purpose is burnt games for old consoles.
jimt1234 2y ago
Back in the late-90s, I did datacenter support for a large company. I used to get calls all the time, asking for some sort of hardware support. However, it was almost always impossible to find the caller's server because most people never knew the location, and nothing was ever labeled correctly, anyway. So, I used to tell callers, "Eject the CD-ROM." ... It worked every time. LOL
cubefox 2y ago
Related: A few years later, Bill Gates would make the rather absurd prediction that there would be no successor to the DVD, because in the future, people would simply stream their movies over the Internet!
- jasonfarnon 2y ago
  I hadn't heard that, but looking it up this is what I see from cnbc: ' “Oh, they’ll [vcr's] be replaced by a disc player within four or five years,” Gates says. “I’m talking about access to media across the network.” In other words, Gates is describing our ability to watch movies, TV shows and other streaming videos online. ' I'm not entirely sure he means the Internet by "the network"? In the same interview he refers to the Internet as "the Net".
  - cubefox 2y ago
    What I meant was an interview from 2004 referenced here (couldn't find the original source online): https://www.nmz.de/politik-betrieb/kulturpolitik/bill-gates-sieht-keine-zukunft-fuer-dvd-player https://www.nmz.de/politik-betrieb/kulturpolitik/bill-gates-... He said DVDs would be replaced within 10 years by VOD TV. He also claimed that phones and Pocket PCs would have a big future.
ideasphere 2y ago
I’m also the friend who brings up Cinemania once a month for no reason. Not literally the same one but I used to love it. Now, I just sit peering between ads at 2-3 lines of Fast Company articles while trying to work out how to close the autoplay video ad…
linsomniac 2y ago
In the late 90s and early 2000s my company shipped out a Linux distribution on CD monthly, called KRUD. Every month we'd take the latest versions of packages for RedHat, plus some notable additions, and build updated media you could use to update or install Red Hat with. It was really nice to be able to install a new system, which we did a lot of, and have basically the latest packages, with Internet-based "yum update"s being fairly minimal after install. So every month we'd burn, IIRC, nearly a thousand CDs and ship them out, mostly around the US. We were in a weird size where we had low enough volume and needed quick enough turn around, that going to big CD duplicators weren't really an option. Anyone remember the Taiyo Yuden CD-R media? We spent a very long time trying various media and eventually settled on it as "the perfect CD-R". We spent years trouble-shooting problems that different people had, even paying people to ship defective media back to us so we could identify if it was burning problems or shipping problems. We had a shelving unit full of SFF PCs with CD-RW drives and some custom software I wrote that would burn, and verify the media. Our shipped-defect rate went way down when I built some custom verification software. Initially I was just doing an "dd | md5sum" of the CD drive, after ejecting and re-loading the disc. But we eventually tracked user problems down to some drives having sporadic problems reading some sectors, which our drives would try several times and eventually get a good read of. My new verification used low-level SCSI commands to read every block of data and get timing information, and if any sector took more than X ms to read, or more than Y sectors took more than X/5 ms to read, it would "fail" the disc. At this point we basically never had people reporting issues with the media. Taiyo Yuden discs seemed to be the sweet spot between low cost and low defect rate.
- creamyhorror 2y ago
  Yes, Taiyo Yuden discs were great. They actually pioneered CD-Rs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiyo_Yuden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiyo_Yuden If only we had more high-quality companies like them that didn't get bought out or enshittify their products.
- myself248 2y ago
  Oh yeah, and there were all sorts of softwares to make the best of partial reads. I had one that I can't find the name of right now, that would compute forward-error-correction and make an additional file that you could store on the same disc, or on the last disc of a set. If you had 500MB of data, you could compute 150MB of FEC and fill the 650MB disc, and recover from up to 149.9MB of bad sectors later. (And that was the failures that got through the C1 and C2 error correction built into the drive, of course.) There was another thing called jigdo, "jigsaw downloader", which would take a collection of files in a filesystem, and use them as the source to reconstruct a bit-perfect ISO. You could put the .jigdo file on the media itself, and the recipient could read the files, discarding the ones that failed, and (perhaps automatically?I don't remember this part) fetch only the failed ones over the internet, and reconstruct the original .ISO that you meant for them to have in the first place, with hopefully only a few minutes of dialup time. Later, I found that BitTorrent could accomplish something similar. You could pre-seed your local copy of a torrent with burned media, flawed or perfect, didn't matter, just copy it to a writable hard drive. Launch your torrent client and point it to the "existing files on disk", and do a "force re-check", and it would go through and verify every block checksum according to the .torrent itself, joining the swarm to fetch the ones that failed and seed the ones that matched. In this way, if you had several discs with nonoverlapping errors, even without internet reachability, you could use local peer discovery make a LAN-only swarm and your clients would all share blocks and correct each other into all having a perfect copy. I used this when I had a big pile of files that I wanted to hand out hundreds of copies of, to a hopefully-technically-savvy audience. Time was of the essence so I was burning at max speed and making my share of coasters, but I kept the failed burns, making sure that the .torrent itself on disc and the README describing this concept were readable, even if the rest of the burn was trash, and those were the ones I'd hand to people I knew could handle it. Sure enough, that evening I popped online and saw that a handful people had joined the swarm, most with a 99%-complete-already copy of the files, and they reached 100% in very short order, even the ones on dialup.
amyjess 2y ago
When I was a kid in the '90s, I looked forward to every issue of CD-ROM Today because it always came with a disc that was loaded with games, software demos, icon packs, and more. I had so much fun with those discs, even fired up Basilisk II and tracked down the ISOs a few years ago to recapture some of that joy.
rsaarelm 2y ago
I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things. Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.
animal531 2y ago
I have a much older brother who was also into computers in the 80's and he bought himself all the newest toys of the time such as a VGA screen, a sound card and eventually a CD-ROM drive. Some time after that I turned 16 and a CD drive of my own was the only thing I desired for my birthday. Unfortunately my dad didn't get the hints and when a guy owed him some money he instead paid my dad by handing over an old Nissan Sentra Coupe, which my dad decided would be my birthday present. I wasn't completely ungrateful, it was a great present. BUT where I live you can't get a license until you're 18 so I had to just stare at the car standing in the garage for two years.
harel 2y ago
I used to manage a CD-rom shop in the mid 90s. We sold new titles and bought back software from customers to sell again as second hand. It was quite popular at the time. Not to mention I had access to a 486dx computer, later with voodoo, so that when the first tomb raider came out I was in heaven. What I miss most is that moment of anticipation between putting in the disk and starting that install dance, awe config, RAM setup etc...
bloomingeek 2y ago
Being an old timer, I remember a teenager showing me, for the first time, how easy it was to skip to any song I wanted without having to hunt for it, like on a cassette deck. It was mind blowing! Then, purchasing a CD-RW for my desktop machine, it was a game changer. Ripping my own music CDs in MP3 was crazy fun. I could now carry about ten albums on one CD-R disc! Next thing I know, MP3 players were invented and here we go again! I will say however, today I worry about how I'm gonna easily and cheaply recycle those discs.
syngrog66 2y ago
I worked at one of the first wave of web dev shops. And we also made CD-ROMs for our business clients. Line blurred. Because the kinds of CD-ROMs we produced typically had a direcrory of web-linked content on them. Like a website burned into plastic. An index page and lots of HTML and client-side JS, with embedded graphical image files. A good fit for catalogs, info archiving, educational resources or entertainment. Of course we also made live, Internet-exposed websites and web apps too. Server-side logic usually in Perl or C. Fuzzy memories of ColdFusion, and Macromedia Flash. The only web server we liked to use was Apache. Our most famous client was a little old book publisher named O'Reilly. I forget if either we helped work on their first site, or if we just made some multimedia CD-ROM adaptations of some of their books. We did some work related to Larry Wall's camel book.
teleforce 2y ago
CD-ROM or just CD, a storage format made popular by the music industry so that they can sell many singles at ludicrously expensive price of more than USD10 per song per CD. These singles are the special CD with the latest or popular songs that you cannot buy using normal CD that contained many songs by the same artist. One CD had the size of 650 MB meaning that for lossless audio song, the maximum number of songs is less than 20. Unless you are Michael Jackson or selling your best songs compilation, most of other songs in the CD are lousy except the one song that toping the charts provided that if you had any. In other words, many song in the CD are just unwanted fillers. Then somebody figured out you can perform lossy compression with mp3 and fit hundreds of songs in a single CD, but the music industry that has been selling singles CD for more than USD10 per piece is not going to sell hundreds of song in one CD for peanuts. Then came Napster revolution that empowered the consumer with easily accessible songs for less than peanuts (read free) and then not long after came lawsuits from Metallica. Steve Jobs by the virtue of being the boss of Disney, the darling of entertainment and music industry at the time, single handedly convinced the industry to sell a single song for 99 cents that can be downloaded from the Internet and saved the day for the music industry, then the rest is history and CD become history. After the demise of Steve, Apple become the first trillion dollars company and then the first three trillion dollars company in history.
- canadianfella 2y ago
  [dead]
solardev 2y ago
Strange to see it as sort of a competitor to the Internet. They coexisted fine for a while until broadband became common, but that wasn't until well into the 2000s. Many games and apps were distributed on CDs but connected to online services or multiplayer peers over the internet. It was the combination of commonplace broadband and subscription profits (Adobe, Microsoft, Steam, Netflix) that really ended physical media, IMO. Why sell a disc once when you can sell a renewal every month.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  CD-ROMs weren't really a competitor to the Internet, they were in consumer hands before many people even got on the Internet. Home PCs shipped with copies of Encarta or Groliers before they came standard with modems. It was more the Internet started to compete with the breadth and size of the content people would find on their CDs. If you went to computer expos in the 90s there would always be people with tables covered in discs filled with different content. Everything from whole copies of BBSes to public FTPs to random collections of fonts and stock photos. For many people that sort of stuff was more accessible via CD-ROM than the Internet.
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    They were a bridge to the internet IMO - without them, I don’t think the web would have grown as explosively as it did - they encouraged adoption of PCs with multimedia features, and provided the spur for people to experiment with and get serious about digital content.
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  > Many games and apps were distributed on CDs but connected to online services or multiplayer peers over the internet Or just for straight-up copy protection, up to requiring the CD even though everything’s installed locally (or just for large data assets that technically weren’t required like background music or pre-mission story videos). I’m impressed that gamecopyworld is still around letting you play some of these legacy games as single-player and/or with no-CD cracks. Lots of adult themed ads that seem locally hosted (and bypass my DNS-based ad blocker…): https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml
jsz0 2y ago
As corny as they seem now the early FMV CD-ROM games felt like a gigantic leap forward at the time. Being able to interact with a photorealistic environment was a completely new experience. Being too ignorant at the time to understood how they worked it seemed like pure magic. Of course they were nothing but a novelty in retrospect but the illusion was very real at the time.
- Fomite 2y ago
  This. I remember playing a Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM game with tiny little clips of FMV, and feeling like this was the future.
  - esaym 2y ago
    Ha, I was going to say that. I think it was like 1992 and we got a packard bell for Christmas and it came with a stack of shareware CDs. 2mhz and 2MB of ram I believe. There was some kind of Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM point 'n click type game that had a bunch of FMVs. The whole family would gather around (sometimes the neighbors included) and we'd all oodle over the "graphics".
    - ido 2y ago
      Definitely not 2Mhz, maybe 20 or 25Mhz? 33mhz was also common in that time frame. Even the original PC from 1981 ran at 4.77mhz.
  - pocketarc 2y ago
    I'm assuming it's Sherlock Holmes and the case of the rose tattoo! What a brilliant game. Believe it or not, thanks to ScummVM being in the iOS/iPad OS App Store now, I have actually played that game on my iPad. You'd be amazed at how well it's held up. It looks really good on an iPad, and the point and click nature of it fits touchscreens perfectly.
  - agent86 2y ago
    How about Weezer's "Buddy Holly" music video on the Windows 95 CD? Sometimes when I see articles about viral videos and views I wonder where that video would rank if we had the capability to track its plays.
timonoko 2y ago
I need to combine CDROMs so that they form a radar reflector. With lots of 90 degree corners. Preferably a folding radar reflector. Some attending Origami Master might have solutions that are less obvious and simpler than just cutting them into 90 degrees slices?
- _yb2s 2y ago
  Don't design your own radar reflector unless you can test it- it might not work.
  - timonoko 2y ago
    Achually I am an expert. When I was kayaking in Chile all those small boats had such reflectors made of tin cans. The construction was so particular and uniform that it must have been goverment mandated.
- ggm 2y ago
  don't cut them up. Make one radial slit on each of two, and .. slot them together.
  - timonoko 2y ago
    This works with two, but you need third to make 3D-reflector. There is no elegant solution except cutting 90 degrees slices. And it does not fold easily.
    - ggm 2y ago
      slot 2 the way I described and then you only have to cut quarters for the 3rd disc. Making it demountable is about glueing tabs to hold things solid surely?
      - timonoko 2y ago
        The aim is to make it totally foldable and flat. For example: In life rafts they often have inflatable balloons, which have metallic foils inside in this 3D - configuration.
andrewstuart 2y ago
I feel resentful about CD-ROM. I was a true believer and it distracted me from what really mattered, that was happening at exactly the same time - the Internet.
- ggm 2y ago
  Encarta provided the same function a complete set of Britannica 1918 edition, for his young mind. And it worked when the modem was busy downloading a new BSD release for me.
Brajeshwar 2y ago
Oh, Come on. My girlfriend gifted me a CD-Case (1995-1996) because I was one of the few weird guys who did the CDs and stuff while that lousy-sleepy town barely got the right cassettes on time. I loved that phase. I learned about HTML, read up on the trends, and a lot about computers from the CDs that came with the magazines. I had my first "IDE" from a CD—HotDog HTML Editor.
mikewarot 2y ago
Back in the olden days, we had a customer who wanted, and got budget for, a CD-ROM burner, with the requisite Adaptec SCSI adapter, cables, burning software, etc. Blank CDs were $5 each, and you only got one chance to write them. It got to the point that you didn't even touch the computer while it was burning a CD. If you looked at it wrong, or talked too loud, or seemed to be having a good day ... Poof.. buffer underflow, and a $5 coaster. I grew to hate Adaptec, and had a really bad case of the SCSI Blues. I'll never forget, nor forgive them.
- rconti 2y ago
  This was a good experience. SCSI adapters (with their onboard I/O) and burners were for the rich. The bad experience was anyone stuck using IDE drives, which relied on the CPU to handle all the I/O. They were the ones getting buffer underruns.
- esafak 2y ago
  But were you using Taiyo-Yudens on a Plextor FTW??
  - liotier 2y ago
    Even with Pentium + Adaptec 2940UW + UW SCSI disks + Plextor SCSI + tons of RAM, just opening notepad.exe resulted in a buffer underflow... I practically held my breath while the damn thing was burning a CD !
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Man, I used every kind of blank media on a Plextor PR-820. At first I tried to make a study of it and ordered many, many kinds of blanks from different actual-manufacturers. Some were more expensive, some were fairly cheap. I left them in hot places with bright light. I left them in cold places with no light. I handled them roughly. They all worked fine, except for the ones that were damaged from handling. I wound up with a preference for Kodak-branded media, because it had what I perceived to be a more durable protective coating on top and top-layer scratches seemed to be the worst killers of CD-Rs in my samples. Later, once inkjet-printable discs became more common, I used those instead -- regardless of brand. The relatively thick, white coating was easy to write on legibly with a Sharpie and seemed to do a good-enough job of protecting the lacquer below it from being scratched.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trustno2 2y ago
I still have amazing memories of playing with Dorling Kindersley CD ROMs as a kid The Way Things Work. Encyclopedia of Space and Universe. Encyclopedia of Nature. And looking back at those on YouTube, they were pretty great! There is nothing like that in iPad era for kids. What comes close are those interactive iBooks that Apple tried to push when iBooks were new, but they never really caught on
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  And my personal favourite, Eyewitness Earth Quest! I extracted the pictures of stones from the CD-ROM and used them as desktop backgrounds for a while. I found Castle Explorer, another Dorling Kindersly release, also very educational, albeit nigh impossible as a game! (Thus it also taught me not to consider spying as a profession, be that in Norman times or the present day...) I think the entire Eyewitness franchise, from the original books to the interactive games, can rightfully be considered a masterpiece both in multimedia and education.
  - trustno2 2y ago
    The VHS were pretty underwhelming, which I could tell even as a kid

153 points by ecliptik 2y ago

Like many other commenters here, I, too, used CD-ROMs in the 90s.

I miss putting in a disk, hearing the drive spin up, my computer coming to life and working away. Now I open a program, it reaches out to the internet, maybe I get some crappy spinner that is intermittently doing a thing, it's an inconstant experience. Content provided is of course faster and there's incalculably more information available. But that process / time of loading up a big CD felt so good compared to the current experience. I work on web apps and no amount of work ever seems to provide the positive feedback / loading experience of a CD-ROM. There's just no spinner or progress bar that seems that direct or satisfying.

moomoo11 2y ago
Make all your website spinners CD ROMs and play an audio of the spinning up sound.
- recursive 2y ago
  It's not the full effect. I remember feeling the torque impulse through the desk.
  - acidburnNSA 2y ago
    We could make little USB gyros that simulate that.
  - myself248 2y ago
    Oh yeah, holding a spinning Discman you could notice the gyroscopic force; don't pivot it too fast or it'll precess beyond the suspension's compliance and scrape the edge of the disc! And that was only spinning at 1x; later faster data drives were weirdly powerful. I had a little experience with a 24x drive in a laptop and you didn't dare move it while the disc was spinning. Thankfully they never went faster than that in portables; a 48x slimline would've been dangerous.
wlesieutre 2y ago
Walking past computers in Starfield you hear them making hard drive noises and I realized I miss that. It's great how quiet computers are now, but there was something to being able to hear the computer thinking too.
- ajuc 2y ago
  I remember I could recognize the sound floppy disk drives made when they encountered read error, so I knew before the error message appeared that I had to go copy the floppy again :)
  - myself248 2y ago
    Combine that with the speakers picking up a GSM call setup sequence before the phone actually rang, and you were pretty much clairvoyant.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  Here, put this on in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0
- andruby 2y ago
  I'm glad I grew up hearing floppy disks, hard drives seek, cd drives spin and most importantly, a modem establish a connection. Silence is nice too though.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Honestly, all the silence has made me more wary of computer temperatures. I never used to be able to hear the fans, but now that everything is solid state, they're the one constant. And it worries me occasionally when they kick on for no discernable reason.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    That modem sequence is probably one of the most memorable pieces of a whole generation's childhood. If you ask me now, when it's been over two decades since I've heard it, I would easily be able to badly reproduce the whole 30 second soundbite with my voice from memory. With confidence I could probably nail every single beep and boop including the pauses between them and the odd static sound near the end of the whole process.
thih9 2y ago
> Now I open a program, it reaches out to the internet, maybe I get some crappy spinner that is intermittently doing a thing Yes, that’s unfortunate. Offline physical drives still exist in some areas; I keep my nintendo switch mostly in airplane mode and use cartridges. SD card slot made a surprising return to Macbook Pros. Even CDs have their direct successors, e.g. M-Discs[1] are popular for long term data storage. But yes, none of that exists in the realm of web apps. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
agumonkey 2y ago
Same. There's a human need for sensations / stimulations / details that made the pre-digital era very satisfying and touching. Last time I booted a pentium box, to fix an old tape drive I was staggered by how lovely that old device felt. The led, the smooth motor hiss, the read patterns. Felt so cool even in the era of nvme ssd.
- nayuki 2y ago
  Compact Discs are digital.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    the electromechanical device reading them is not
    - nayuki 2y ago
      It's not like network cables (physical objects) and radio waves (physical phenomena) are digital either.
      - agumonkey 2y ago
        we were discussing the supporting devices of that era, not the underlying principles
aunty_helen 2y ago
And then when you get a small scratch and you hear the drive constantly trying to seek until it gives up… absolute bliss.
gregmac 2y ago
In the 90s I ran a dial-up BBS, and at some point, I had acquired a 4-CD changer. It was equally satisfying to hear it randomly come to life changing disks as someone had logged on to download something.
- jasonfarnon 2y ago
  Did you have a pretty static download section? Or were you constantly burning new CDs? I vaguely remember Sysops mentioning CD changers in their advertisements.
  - loloquwowndueo 2y ago
    What do you mean? Do you have any idea how long it would take people to download even a fraction of a single CD’s 650MB at 9600 bps at best? My bbs probably switched CDs every 6 months.
  - gregmac 2y ago
    Fairly static, but I'd cycle the CDs every few months. Even in the 28.8K modem era, people didn't suck down everything they could, partly due to time, partly due to storage space (eg: the reason I used CDs instead of big drives is because big drives were very expensive), so the life of these was pretty long. The software was also not rapidly changing, probably because distribution was harder (so: get it right the first time), and also partly because it was mostly for offline use (no network, servers, etc to stay in sync with or worry about remote vulnerabilities from).
neom 2y ago
This was also extremely satisfying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCe6xnxdN1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCe6xnxdN1Y
- Arrath 2y ago
  Ah, the noise that preceded a great number of Starcraft matches.
  - nickpeterson 2y ago
    I’m going to wall the ramp with a depot and a barracks then drop tanks on their ledge, you take your natural and pump hydras. These guys don’t know what’s up.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Oh. So that's what those noises were. I actually learned a thing today.
  - neom 2y ago
    That channel also has one on if they fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnvBxYKDlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnvBxYKDlc
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    I might interest you in the museum of endangered sounds… http://savethesounds.info/ http://savethesounds.info/
- nayuki 2y ago
  Related: https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/soundofmodems/index.htm https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/soundofmodems/index.htm https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-collection-of-v-90v-92-modem-sounds/ https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-colle...
lxgr 2y ago
I really don't miss the disastrous random access latency of optical media, nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever (or a friend doing the same to a game I'd lent them). But what they definitely had going for them is that they were dirt cheap. Nobody thought twice to burn a CD with some photos for their friends; USB thumb drives are of course much faster and higher capacity, but also not something you'd gladly part with several times a month. Another big advantage that media-based software (like console video games) had in pre-Internet times was that it was mostly self-contained. These days, consoles might still support physical media, but they serves more as DRM authentication tokens; once you insert a disk or cartridge, it's minutes of installation to hard disk and potentially hours of fetching updates from the Internet. That's really less of a feature of disks though, and more about the practical inability to patch software once it was shipped. That definitely made QA a lot more thorough than it is today.
- tkiolp4 2y ago
  > I really don't miss the disastrous random access latency of optical media, nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever (or a friend doing the same to a game I'd lent them). I’m the opposite. What I fear is the dozens of content providers (YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc.) suddenly removing or blocking access to their content. I keep a local copy of everything I can.
  - jasonfarnon 2y ago
    But I think of CDs as the start of this era of transience. Every single CD I burned was useless after a couple of years of sitting in a spindle. Most of my 3.5" floppies from the 90s still work fine, with maybe a few bad sectors. I don't know, maybe I bought cheap CDs to start with--I think the factory burned non-writable CDs lasted.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      "Prerecorded" CDs are actually not "burned" by a laser (in the way that CD-Rs are) in the factory, but "stamped"/injection molded from a negative. It's a completely different process! Since there is no photosensitive dye involved on the final prerecorded disc, this makes them orders of magnitude more durable. That dye is what breaks down over time on CD-Rs, making them unreadable.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> I miss putting in a disk, hearing the drive spin up, my computer coming to life and working away. I still use optical media once in a while. I've got quite a collection of readers, stacked on a shelf in the garage. And a few discs with data on them and a stash of empty discs waiting to be burned. If you miss it, just buy an external Blu-ray writer. 25 to, what, 100 GB per disk is not too bad for the really important stuff. They're not mutually exclusive with other forms of backups.
will1am 2y ago
Physical media reminds us of an earlier era of computing and it was exciting
zzo38computer 2y ago
I use optical discs sometimes, including for backups (I think the use of WORM media for making backup copies is beneficial). There is also benefit of locally stored data. You can store them in hard drive, although sometimes external media can be helpful too, rather than needing to use internet for any transfers.
oopsallmagic 2y ago
I miss actually owning software that couldn't be rewritten or revoked at any given time.
verelo 2y ago
This reminds me of things my dad says about his old Chrysler Valiant, “i love turning the car over, adjusting the choke, and hearing it catch on a cold winters morning”. To me it was just inconvenient, and to him too, but now he looks back at it as something to envy. I guess the electric car is the internet and the valiant is the cd rom? Although the valiant was more of a steam train to me haha.
fukawi2 2y ago
I remember as a kid loading up the Encarta95 CD on the family 486, and the anticipation of what I could discover in the seemingly endless world of information that little spinning silver disc held within. There is no contemporaneous equivalent.
- latentsea 2y ago
  I remember playing that game that was within Encarta where you would move between different rooms.
- massysett 2y ago
  Encarta paid for licensed content too, so it had nice audio clips of, say, Malcolm X speaking. Wikipedia is of course much more expansive in content, but since it all has to be Free, in some ways it doesn’t match what Encarta had.
ngcazz 2y ago
Unless you had one of those Matsushita drives that came bundled with the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0. they definitely didn't last...

neilv 2y ago

While spring-cleaning tech cruft recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many CD-ROMs now have eBay value, even ones that you'd think no one would ever want anymore. (In the US, I assume a shipping cost of $4.13 Media Mail, with whatever eBay discount. And I can tape together a mailer of corrugated cardboard cut from an Amazon box. Plan to net $10+ after postage and eBay's cut, value your time at 0, and a box of old CD-ROMs adds up.)

tiltowait 2y ago

I question some of the figures in this article. It’s hard to believe 1994 is “peak CD”. I’d have expected that to be 1998-9. The PS1 didn’t come out until 1995 and must have represented a huge boost to both CDs and drives sold. The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.

bombcar 2y ago
1994 was when the CD felt peak, even though it grew in popularity later. 1994 was still solidly in the floppy era, and getting a CD-ROM was huge, even larger than some hard drives at the time. If you had a CD-ROM drive in 1994, you were king.
- pak9rabid 2y ago
  Quad Speed! ;)
  - bombcar 2y ago
    It was later but we got a Kenwood True-X 72x and that thing was a beast!
    - keyneus 2y ago
      I remember upgrading from a 4x to 24x, and being excited for the much faster data transfer rate. What I didn't anticipate was the fact that it sounded like a jet taking off when it spun that fast! I figured out how to ratchet it down to 4x and kept it there unless I knew I'd need a fast sustained rate for something like copying hundreds of megs. It wasn't worth the noise for smaller transfers.
- will1am 2y ago
  Paarticularly in the context of both gaming and music
- jasonfarnon 2y ago
  if you're excluding "peak of popularity" what is it the "peak" of?

WillAdams 2y ago

I really miss the innovation/energy of this time frame --- things such as Microsoft's Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM: https://www.old-games.com/download/3304/leonardo-da-vinci https://www.old-games.com/download/3304/leonardo-da-vinci were amazing, and a great way to encourage learning and exploration of knowledge for children. I guess this sort of thing is done as apps now, but it doesn't quite seem the same --- not sure why.

biofox 2y ago
As a kid in the 90s, Encarta was pure magic to me.

moth-fuzz 2y ago

The thing that I miss mainly about CDs and floppies and even SD cards to an extent is that they were actually integrated into the machine itself. Modern removable storage solutions just use the Universal Serial Bus, and could look like anything, and have no specified shape or size, and stick out of the machine. CDs, floppies, and SDs slide nicely into a dedicated opening, and go all the way in. They’re nicely stackable and sortable. You can even write on them for quick labeling. Very user friendly.

draazon 2y ago

I’m somewhat surprised that the article doesn’t mention Robert Winter’s “The Interactive Beethoven”. I kept an old ThinkPad running for a long time after it should have been obsoleted, just so that I could spin up that disc. Amazing sound quality, great use of hypermedia… a real CD-ROM showpiece.

pbj1968 2y ago

Made a “lot” of money (for a teenager) installing cd rom drives into computers in the 90s. The article isn’t lying - everyone I knew was buying them circa 1994 with no idea how to install them. I remember the first high speed one I installed… vibrated the entire desk. Now I’m buying them for $12 shipped off eBay and using usb to power them. Only purpose is burnt games for old consoles.

jimt1234 2y ago

Back in the late-90s, I did datacenter support for a large company. I used to get calls all the time, asking for some sort of hardware support. However, it was almost always impossible to find the caller's server because most people never knew the location, and nothing was ever labeled correctly, anyway. So, I used to tell callers, "Eject the CD-ROM." ... It worked every time. LOL

cubefox 2y ago

Related: A few years later, Bill Gates would make the rather absurd prediction that there would be no successor to the DVD, because in the future, people would simply stream their movies over the Internet!

jasonfarnon 2y ago
I hadn't heard that, but looking it up this is what I see from cnbc: ' “Oh, they’ll [vcr's] be replaced by a disc player within four or five years,” Gates says. “I’m talking about access to media across the network.” In other words, Gates is describing our ability to watch movies, TV shows and other streaming videos online. ' I'm not entirely sure he means the Internet by "the network"? In the same interview he refers to the Internet as "the Net".
- cubefox 2y ago
  What I meant was an interview from 2004 referenced here (couldn't find the original source online): https://www.nmz.de/politik-betrieb/kulturpolitik/bill-gates-sieht-keine-zukunft-fuer-dvd-player https://www.nmz.de/politik-betrieb/kulturpolitik/bill-gates-... He said DVDs would be replaced within 10 years by VOD TV. He also claimed that phones and Pocket PCs would have a big future.

ideasphere 2y ago

I’m also the friend who brings up Cinemania once a month for no reason. Not literally the same one but I used to love it. Now, I just sit peering between ads at 2-3 lines of Fast Company articles while trying to work out how to close the autoplay video ad…

linsomniac 2y ago

In the late 90s and early 2000s my company shipped out a Linux distribution on CD monthly, called KRUD. Every month we'd take the latest versions of packages for RedHat, plus some notable additions, and build updated media you could use to update or install Red Hat with. It was really nice to be able to install a new system, which we did a lot of, and have basically the latest packages, with Internet-based "yum update"s being fairly minimal after install. So every month we'd burn, IIRC, nearly a thousand CDs and ship them out, mostly around the US. We were in a weird size where we had low enough volume and needed quick enough turn around, that going to big CD duplicators weren't really an option. Anyone remember the Taiyo Yuden CD-R media? We spent a very long time trying various media and eventually settled on it as "the perfect CD-R". We spent years trouble-shooting problems that different people had, even paying people to ship defective media back to us so we could identify if it was burning problems or shipping problems. We had a shelving unit full of SFF PCs with CD-RW drives and some custom software I wrote that would burn, and verify the media. Our shipped-defect rate went way down when I built some custom verification software. Initially I was just doing an "dd | md5sum" of the CD drive, after ejecting and re-loading the disc. But we eventually tracked user problems down to some drives having sporadic problems reading some sectors, which our drives would try several times and eventually get a good read of. My new verification used low-level SCSI commands to read every block of data and get timing information, and if any sector took more than X ms to read, or more than Y sectors took more than X/5 ms to read, it would "fail" the disc. At this point we basically never had people reporting issues with the media. Taiyo Yuden discs seemed to be the sweet spot between low cost and low defect rate.

creamyhorror 2y ago
Yes, Taiyo Yuden discs were great. They actually pioneered CD-Rs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiyo_Yuden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiyo_Yuden If only we had more high-quality companies like them that didn't get bought out or enshittify their products.
myself248 2y ago
Oh yeah, and there were all sorts of softwares to make the best of partial reads. I had one that I can't find the name of right now, that would compute forward-error-correction and make an additional file that you could store on the same disc, or on the last disc of a set. If you had 500MB of data, you could compute 150MB of FEC and fill the 650MB disc, and recover from up to 149.9MB of bad sectors later. (And that was the failures that got through the C1 and C2 error correction built into the drive, of course.) There was another thing called jigdo, "jigsaw downloader", which would take a collection of files in a filesystem, and use them as the source to reconstruct a bit-perfect ISO. You could put the .jigdo file on the media itself, and the recipient could read the files, discarding the ones that failed, and (perhaps automatically?I don't remember this part) fetch only the failed ones over the internet, and reconstruct the original .ISO that you meant for them to have in the first place, with hopefully only a few minutes of dialup time. Later, I found that BitTorrent could accomplish something similar. You could pre-seed your local copy of a torrent with burned media, flawed or perfect, didn't matter, just copy it to a writable hard drive. Launch your torrent client and point it to the "existing files on disk", and do a "force re-check", and it would go through and verify every block checksum according to the .torrent itself, joining the swarm to fetch the ones that failed and seed the ones that matched. In this way, if you had several discs with nonoverlapping errors, even without internet reachability, you could use local peer discovery make a LAN-only swarm and your clients would all share blocks and correct each other into all having a perfect copy. I used this when I had a big pile of files that I wanted to hand out hundreds of copies of, to a hopefully-technically-savvy audience. Time was of the essence so I was burning at max speed and making my share of coasters, but I kept the failed burns, making sure that the .torrent itself on disc and the README describing this concept were readable, even if the rest of the burn was trash, and those were the ones I'd hand to people I knew could handle it. Sure enough, that evening I popped online and saw that a handful people had joined the swarm, most with a 99%-complete-already copy of the files, and they reached 100% in very short order, even the ones on dialup.

amyjess 2y ago

When I was a kid in the '90s, I looked forward to every issue of CD-ROM Today because it always came with a disc that was loaded with games, software demos, icon packs, and more. I had so much fun with those discs, even fired up Basilisk II and tracked down the ISOs a few years ago to recapture some of that joy.

rsaarelm 2y ago

I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things. Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.

animal531 2y ago

I have a much older brother who was also into computers in the 80's and he bought himself all the newest toys of the time such as a VGA screen, a sound card and eventually a CD-ROM drive. Some time after that I turned 16 and a CD drive of my own was the only thing I desired for my birthday. Unfortunately my dad didn't get the hints and when a guy owed him some money he instead paid my dad by handing over an old Nissan Sentra Coupe, which my dad decided would be my birthday present. I wasn't completely ungrateful, it was a great present. BUT where I live you can't get a license until you're 18 so I had to just stare at the car standing in the garage for two years.

harel 2y ago

I used to manage a CD-rom shop in the mid 90s. We sold new titles and bought back software from customers to sell again as second hand. It was quite popular at the time. Not to mention I had access to a 486dx computer, later with voodoo, so that when the first tomb raider came out I was in heaven. What I miss most is that moment of anticipation between putting in the disk and starting that install dance, awe config, RAM setup etc...

bloomingeek 2y ago

Being an old timer, I remember a teenager showing me, for the first time, how easy it was to skip to any song I wanted without having to hunt for it, like on a cassette deck. It was mind blowing! Then, purchasing a CD-RW for my desktop machine, it was a game changer. Ripping my own music CDs in MP3 was crazy fun. I could now carry about ten albums on one CD-R disc! Next thing I know, MP3 players were invented and here we go again! I will say however, today I worry about how I'm gonna easily and cheaply recycle those discs.

syngrog66 2y ago

I worked at one of the first wave of web dev shops. And we also made CD-ROMs for our business clients. Line blurred. Because the kinds of CD-ROMs we produced typically had a direcrory of web-linked content on them. Like a website burned into plastic. An index page and lots of HTML and client-side JS, with embedded graphical image files. A good fit for catalogs, info archiving, educational resources or entertainment. Of course we also made live, Internet-exposed websites and web apps too. Server-side logic usually in Perl or C. Fuzzy memories of ColdFusion, and Macromedia Flash. The only web server we liked to use was Apache. Our most famous client was a little old book publisher named O'Reilly. I forget if either we helped work on their first site, or if we just made some multimedia CD-ROM adaptations of some of their books. We did some work related to Larry Wall's camel book.

teleforce 2y ago

CD-ROM or just CD, a storage format made popular by the music industry so that they can sell many singles at ludicrously expensive price of more than USD10 per song per CD. These singles are the special CD with the latest or popular songs that you cannot buy using normal CD that contained many songs by the same artist. One CD had the size of 650 MB meaning that for lossless audio song, the maximum number of songs is less than 20. Unless you are Michael Jackson or selling your best songs compilation, most of other songs in the CD are lousy except the one song that toping the charts provided that if you had any. In other words, many song in the CD are just unwanted fillers. Then somebody figured out you can perform lossy compression with mp3 and fit hundreds of songs in a single CD, but the music industry that has been selling singles CD for more than USD10 per piece is not going to sell hundreds of song in one CD for peanuts. Then came Napster revolution that empowered the consumer with easily accessible songs for less than peanuts (read free) and then not long after came lawsuits from Metallica. Steve Jobs by the virtue of being the boss of Disney, the darling of entertainment and music industry at the time, single handedly convinced the industry to sell a single song for 99 cents that can be downloaded from the Internet and saved the day for the music industry, then the rest is history and CD become history. After the demise of Steve, Apple become the first trillion dollars company and then the first three trillion dollars company in history.

canadianfella 2y ago
[dead]

solardev 2y ago

Strange to see it as sort of a competitor to the Internet. They coexisted fine for a while until broadband became common, but that wasn't until well into the 2000s. Many games and apps were distributed on CDs but connected to online services or multiplayer peers over the internet. It was the combination of commonplace broadband and subscription profits (Adobe, Microsoft, Steam, Netflix) that really ended physical media, IMO. Why sell a disc once when you can sell a renewal every month.

giantrobot 2y ago
CD-ROMs weren't really a competitor to the Internet, they were in consumer hands before many people even got on the Internet. Home PCs shipped with copies of Encarta or Groliers before they came standard with modems. It was more the Internet started to compete with the breadth and size of the content people would find on their CDs. If you went to computer expos in the 90s there would always be people with tables covered in discs filled with different content. Everything from whole copies of BBSes to public FTPs to random collections of fonts and stock photos. For many people that sort of stuff was more accessible via CD-ROM than the Internet.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  They were a bridge to the internet IMO - without them, I don’t think the web would have grown as explosively as it did - they encouraged adoption of PCs with multimedia features, and provided the spur for people to experiment with and get serious about digital content.
Scoundreller 2y ago
> Many games and apps were distributed on CDs but connected to online services or multiplayer peers over the internet Or just for straight-up copy protection, up to requiring the CD even though everything’s installed locally (or just for large data assets that technically weren’t required like background music or pre-mission story videos). I’m impressed that gamecopyworld is still around letting you play some of these legacy games as single-player and/or with no-CD cracks. Lots of adult themed ads that seem locally hosted (and bypass my DNS-based ad blocker…): https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml

jsz0 2y ago

As corny as they seem now the early FMV CD-ROM games felt like a gigantic leap forward at the time. Being able to interact with a photorealistic environment was a completely new experience. Being too ignorant at the time to understood how they worked it seemed like pure magic. Of course they were nothing but a novelty in retrospect but the illusion was very real at the time.

Fomite 2y ago
This. I remember playing a Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM game with tiny little clips of FMV, and feeling like this was the future.
- esaym 2y ago
  Ha, I was going to say that. I think it was like 1992 and we got a packard bell for Christmas and it came with a stack of shareware CDs. 2mhz and 2MB of ram I believe. There was some kind of Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM point 'n click type game that had a bunch of FMVs. The whole family would gather around (sometimes the neighbors included) and we'd all oodle over the "graphics".
  - ido 2y ago
    Definitely not 2Mhz, maybe 20 or 25Mhz? 33mhz was also common in that time frame. Even the original PC from 1981 ran at 4.77mhz.
- pocketarc 2y ago
  I'm assuming it's Sherlock Holmes and the case of the rose tattoo! What a brilliant game. Believe it or not, thanks to ScummVM being in the iOS/iPad OS App Store now, I have actually played that game on my iPad. You'd be amazed at how well it's held up. It looks really good on an iPad, and the point and click nature of it fits touchscreens perfectly.
- agent86 2y ago
  How about Weezer's "Buddy Holly" music video on the Windows 95 CD? Sometimes when I see articles about viral videos and views I wonder where that video would rank if we had the capability to track its plays.

timonoko 2y ago

I need to combine CDROMs so that they form a radar reflector. With lots of 90 degree corners. Preferably a folding radar reflector. Some attending Origami Master might have solutions that are less obvious and simpler than just cutting them into 90 degrees slices?

_yb2s 2y ago
Don't design your own radar reflector unless you can test it- it might not work.
- timonoko 2y ago
  Achually I am an expert. When I was kayaking in Chile all those small boats had such reflectors made of tin cans. The construction was so particular and uniform that it must have been goverment mandated.
ggm 2y ago
don't cut them up. Make one radial slit on each of two, and .. slot them together.
- timonoko 2y ago
  This works with two, but you need third to make 3D-reflector. There is no elegant solution except cutting 90 degrees slices. And it does not fold easily.
  - ggm 2y ago
    slot 2 the way I described and then you only have to cut quarters for the 3rd disc. Making it demountable is about glueing tabs to hold things solid surely?
    - timonoko 2y ago
      The aim is to make it totally foldable and flat. For example: In life rafts they often have inflatable balloons, which have metallic foils inside in this 3D - configuration.

andrewstuart 2y ago

I feel resentful about CD-ROM. I was a true believer and it distracted me from what really mattered, that was happening at exactly the same time - the Internet.

ggm 2y ago
Encarta provided the same function a complete set of Britannica 1918 edition, for his young mind. And it worked when the modem was busy downloading a new BSD release for me.

Brajeshwar 2y ago

Oh, Come on. My girlfriend gifted me a CD-Case (1995-1996) because I was one of the few weird guys who did the CDs and stuff while that lousy-sleepy town barely got the right cassettes on time. I loved that phase. I learned about HTML, read up on the trends, and a lot about computers from the CDs that came with the magazines. I had my first "IDE" from a CD—HotDog HTML Editor.

mikewarot 2y ago

Back in the olden days, we had a customer who wanted, and got budget for, a CD-ROM burner, with the requisite Adaptec SCSI adapter, cables, burning software, etc. Blank CDs were $5 each, and you only got one chance to write them. It got to the point that you didn't even touch the computer while it was burning a CD. If you looked at it wrong, or talked too loud, or seemed to be having a good day ... Poof.. buffer underflow, and a $5 coaster. I grew to hate Adaptec, and had a really bad case of the SCSI Blues. I'll never forget, nor forgive them.

rconti 2y ago
This was a good experience. SCSI adapters (with their onboard I/O) and burners were for the rich. The bad experience was anyone stuck using IDE drives, which relied on the CPU to handle all the I/O. They were the ones getting buffer underruns.
esafak 2y ago
But were you using Taiyo-Yudens on a Plextor FTW??
- liotier 2y ago
  Even with Pentium + Adaptec 2940UW + UW SCSI disks + Plextor SCSI + tons of RAM, just opening notepad.exe resulted in a buffer underflow... I practically held my breath while the damn thing was burning a CD !
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Man, I used every kind of blank media on a Plextor PR-820. At first I tried to make a study of it and ordered many, many kinds of blanks from different actual-manufacturers. Some were more expensive, some were fairly cheap. I left them in hot places with bright light. I left them in cold places with no light. I handled them roughly. They all worked fine, except for the ones that were damaged from handling. I wound up with a preference for Kodak-branded media, because it had what I perceived to be a more durable protective coating on top and top-layer scratches seemed to be the worst killers of CD-Rs in my samples. Later, once inkjet-printable discs became more common, I used those instead -- regardless of brand. The relatively thick, white coating was easy to write on legibly with a Sharpie and seemed to do a good-enough job of protecting the lacquer below it from being scratched.

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trustno2 2y ago

I still have amazing memories of playing with Dorling Kindersley CD ROMs as a kid The Way Things Work. Encyclopedia of Space and Universe. Encyclopedia of Nature. And looking back at those on YouTube, they were pretty great! There is nothing like that in iPad era for kids. What comes close are those interactive iBooks that Apple tried to push when iBooks were new, but they never really caught on

seabass-labrax 2y ago
And my personal favourite, Eyewitness Earth Quest! I extracted the pictures of stones from the CD-ROM and used them as desktop backgrounds for a while. I found Castle Explorer, another Dorling Kindersly release, also very educational, albeit nigh impossible as a game! (Thus it also taught me not to consider spying as a profession, be that in Norman times or the present day...) I think the entire Eyewitness franchise, from the original books to the interactive games, can rightfully be considered a masterpiece both in multimedia and education.
- trustno2 2y ago
  The VHS were pretty underwhelming, which I could tell even as a kid