6 ms·

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 20

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
noduerme 2y ago
That and DRM was always defeated. Physical distribution was profitable. And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.
- pcwalton 2y ago
  > And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model. I mean, say what you will about Steam's server bandwidth, it's at least higher bandwidth than the postal service.
  - denkmoon 2y ago
    Depends where you live ;)
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    But once it gets to your house, it's actually yours. And then you can play it going forward without a service tracking you. Digital ownership is a massive ongoing failure of a marshmallow test.
    - oopsallmagic 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - oopsallmagic 2y ago
      [dead]
    - solardev 2y ago
      What is a "marshmallow test"? I've never heard that phrase before?
      - vel0city 2y ago
shiroiushi 2y ago
Not just that, but it's just plain cheaper and more efficient with commonplace broadband. You don't have to pay for making CDs/DVDs (paying for a master is quite expensive, and the rewriteable ones have poor shelf life and can't be mass-produced nearly as quickly), you don't have to pay for postage, and you're not stuck with whatever's on the master since you can just update your data in your datacenter at any time. I'm just sad that no one's come up with a really good, user-writeable long-term bulk storage solution. CD-Rs and later DVD-Rs were supposed to serve this need, but while they seemed like a ton of space in the 90s, they're tiny now, and later we all found out, the hard way, that the stupid things decay rather rapidly. Now we have BD-Rs but here again the storage size is just too small, and only a fool would trust them to last.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  Archive tape existed well before and well after optical discs. These days, you can fit up to 18TB on a tape. OK, so some smartass will pop up and say that doesn't even fit a RAM dump from some machines, but for most archiving purposes, tape has been consistently the best option for the past 50 years.
- ViktorRay 2y ago
  DVD-R’s are actually still super commonplace in the medical field. They’re the perfect way to provide patients their medical images in a cheap physical format that is readable by all electronic medical systems.
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    I often request Canadian government records through freedom of information, and they keep sending 10mb PDFs on CD-Rs. They’ve improved a bit recently, but was annoying for a while. Also learned that a PS4 (or was it a PS5?) cannot open PDFs :(
  - paradox460 2y ago
    My local place gave me my MRI on a branded thumb drive. After I took it to my Ortho, he said I could use the drive for whatever I wanted
ghaff 2y ago
Well, a ton of the sort of information on CD-ROMs also became readily (and often even legally) available online. The focus of this article seems to be the wonder of having access to all this rich multimedia in your home which wasn't really practical before broadband was common and web content filled out. Some of it probably ended up as proto datahoarders to be sure. I have this massive archive in my house that I will probably never fully explore! I'm sure I still have some of those CDs although a lot are in wonky formats that it would take a lot of effort to access.

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

noduerme 2y ago

That and DRM was always defeated. Physical distribution was profitable. And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.

pcwalton 2y ago
> And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model. I mean, say what you will about Steam's server bandwidth, it's at least higher bandwidth than the postal service.
- denkmoon 2y ago
  Depends where you live ;)
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  But once it gets to your house, it's actually yours. And then you can play it going forward without a service tracking you. Digital ownership is a massive ongoing failure of a marshmallow test.
  - oopsallmagic 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - oopsallmagic 2y ago
    [dead]
  - solardev 2y ago
    What is a "marshmallow test"? I've never heard that phrase before?
    - vel0city 2y ago

shiroiushi 2y ago

Not just that, but it's just plain cheaper and more efficient with commonplace broadband. You don't have to pay for making CDs/DVDs (paying for a master is quite expensive, and the rewriteable ones have poor shelf life and can't be mass-produced nearly as quickly), you don't have to pay for postage, and you're not stuck with whatever's on the master since you can just update your data in your datacenter at any time. I'm just sad that no one's come up with a really good, user-writeable long-term bulk storage solution. CD-Rs and later DVD-Rs were supposed to serve this need, but while they seemed like a ton of space in the 90s, they're tiny now, and later we all found out, the hard way, that the stupid things decay rather rapidly. Now we have BD-Rs but here again the storage size is just too small, and only a fool would trust them to last.

xnorswap 2y ago
Archive tape existed well before and well after optical discs. These days, you can fit up to 18TB on a tape. OK, so some smartass will pop up and say that doesn't even fit a RAM dump from some machines, but for most archiving purposes, tape has been consistently the best option for the past 50 years.
ViktorRay 2y ago
DVD-R’s are actually still super commonplace in the medical field. They’re the perfect way to provide patients their medical images in a cheap physical format that is readable by all electronic medical systems.
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  I often request Canadian government records through freedom of information, and they keep sending 10mb PDFs on CD-Rs. They’ve improved a bit recently, but was annoying for a while. Also learned that a PS4 (or was it a PS5?) cannot open PDFs :(
- paradox460 2y ago
  My local place gave me my MRI on a branded thumb drive. After I took it to my Ortho, he said I could use the drive for whatever I wanted

ghaff 2y ago

Well, a ton of the sort of information on CD-ROMs also became readily (and often even legally) available online. The focus of this article seems to be the wonder of having access to all this rich multimedia in your home which wasn't really practical before broadband was common and web content filled out. Some of it probably ended up as proto datahoarders to be sure. I have this massive archive in my house that I will probably never fully explore! I'm sure I still have some of those CDs although a lot are in wonky formats that it would take a lot of effort to access.