4 ms·
The former; Myst and Wing Commander 3 are usually held up as the two titles that significantly accelerated/drove the roll-out of CD-ROM drives into consumer's h
by sho_hn 13y ago
The former; Myst and Wing Commander 3 are usually held up as the two titles that significantly accelerated/drove the roll-out of CD-ROM drives into consumer's homes.
- mikeash 13y agoIt's funny. Optical drives basically scream "obsolete!" at me now, such that it's hard to remember when they were so important, even though I was around for it.
- laureny 13y agoThey never were important, although Steve Jobs certainly tried to make them so (see his failure with NeXt).
- 6thSigma 13y agoThey were very important. There was a large gap in the mid to late 90s - early 2000s where we would have had to use floppy disks if not for CDs. Broadband wasn't widely available until the mid 2000s.
- ceejayoz 13y agoHuh? Never important? Jumping from 1.44 MB to 700 MB of storage made a pretty big difference in all sorts of media.
- mikeash 13y agoUh, what? Did I just hallucinate software stores filled to the ceiling with optical media?
- thristian 13y agoYou're thinking of read-write magneto-optical drives (like the NeXT cube had), but the rest of the thread is discussing optical drives (CDs and DVDs).
- code_duck 13y agoI also remember the time when they were rare, held what seemed like incredible amounts of data and were very expensive as a computer accessory. I have some Amiga magazines advertising disc burners for around $4000 in 1991. My Amiga had a 20 mb hard drive, floppy drives and no optical drive (a read only drive was 600-800 and somewhat pointless for most everyone). Arcade games based on laserdiscs were quite impressive to me as a child, such as Space Ace. That title seemed quite futuristic in 1988 in no small part due to the giant rainbow disc it flaunted.