The Short, Happy Reign of CD-ROM (fastcompany.com) 148
"Over at Fast Company, where we're celebrating 1994 Week, I wrote about the year of Peak CD-ROM, when excitement over the medium's potential was sky-high and the World Wide Web's audience still numbered in the extremely low millions," writes Slashdot reader and Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken (harrymcc). "I cover once-famous products such as Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia, the curse of shovelware, the rise of a San Francisco neighborhood known as 'Multimedia Gulch,' and why the whole dream soon came crashing down." Here's an excerpt from the article: Thirty years ago, a breakthrough technology was poised to transform how people stayed informed, entertained themselves, and maybe even shopped. I'm not talking about the World Wide Web. True, it was already getting good buzz among early adopter types. But even three years after going online, Tim Berners-Lee's creation was "still relatively slow and crude" and "limited to perhaps two million Internet users who have the proper software to gain access to it," wrote The New York Times' Peter H. Lewis in November 1994. At the time, it was the CD-ROM that had captured the imagination of consumers and the entire publishing industry. The high-capacity optical discs enabled mass distribution of multimedia for the first time, giving software developers the ability to create new kinds of experiences. Some of the largest companies in America saw them as media's next frontier, as did throngs of startups. In terms of pure mindshare, 1994 might have been the year of Peak CD, with 17.5 million CD-ROM drives and $590 million in discs sold, according to research firms Dataquest and Link Resources.
You already know that the frenzy didn't last. As the web got faster, slicker, and more readily accessible, CD-ROMs came to look pretty mundane, and eventually faded from memory. Myst, once the best-selling PC game of all time, might be the only 1990s disc that retains a prominent spot in our shared cultural consciousness. (Full disclosure: I do have a friend who can be relied upon to fondly bring up Microsoft's Cinemania movie guide about once a year for no apparent reason.) Revisiting the discs that defined the mid-1990s -- all of which are incompatible with modern operating systems -- isn't easy. To get some of them up and running again, I downloaded virtual CD-ROM files from the Internet Archive and used them with Windows 3.1 on my iPad Pro, courtesy of a piece of software Apple removed from the App Store in 2021. Spending time with titles such as Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia and It's a Wonderful Life Multi-Media Edition, three decades after they last commanded my attention, was a Proustian rush. You may not want to go to similar extremes. But would you indulge me as I wallow in enough CD-ROM nostalgia to get it out of my system?
You already know that the frenzy didn't last. As the web got faster, slicker, and more readily accessible, CD-ROMs came to look pretty mundane, and eventually faded from memory. Myst, once the best-selling PC game of all time, might be the only 1990s disc that retains a prominent spot in our shared cultural consciousness. (Full disclosure: I do have a friend who can be relied upon to fondly bring up Microsoft's Cinemania movie guide about once a year for no apparent reason.) Revisiting the discs that defined the mid-1990s -- all of which are incompatible with modern operating systems -- isn't easy. To get some of them up and running again, I downloaded virtual CD-ROM files from the Internet Archive and used them with Windows 3.1 on my iPad Pro, courtesy of a piece of software Apple removed from the App Store in 2021. Spending time with titles such as Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia and It's a Wonderful Life Multi-Media Edition, three decades after they last commanded my attention, was a Proustian rush. You may not want to go to similar extremes. But would you indulge me as I wallow in enough CD-ROM nostalgia to get it out of my system?
Excuse me? (Score:2)
Pretty sure that was 1985. The excitement was already brewing then in magazines and The Computer Chronicles.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was invented then, but not widely available, and certainly not standard on computers, until the early 1990s. 7th Guest was one of the first games released on CD-ROM. It came out in 1993. This is one of the programs that made CD-ROMs popular on PCs.
I still have that CD-ROM disc, and many others. Not to mention floppies, tapes, and drives for them that still work. Floppies do have some bad sectors, though. But the tapes are pristine.
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I still have The 7th Guest, The Journeyman Project, Myst III - Excile, and Final Fantasy VII on my shelf that stayed with me for many transfers over the years.
I also have a shrink-wrapped copy of Redhat Linux 5.2 (Book and CD) that I picked up at a book fair, back when book sellers would travel around selling tech books in an open-air fair on base.
Good memories.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:2)
I still have many kilos of OS/2 development books in hardcopy . I was using it while Linux had barely been released. Writing 32 bit multithreaded code in 1992 was something cool. Also writing DOS code in assembly in a virtual machine at the time.
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I wrote multi-threaded code in DOS in 1985 by catching the timer interrupt and using terminate and stay resident code.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:3)
I wrote TSRs with timer interrupt ISRs as well, though not as early as you. You could even chain multiple timer ISRs from different TSRs. It got a bit tricky when the frequencies changed, but it could be done, though I don't immediately remember how.
However, I would not characterize any of that as multi-threading. There was no concept of shared resources, locking, priorities, no scheduler, etc. DOS just didn't provide for any of it. You could call it multi-tasking, maybe even pre-emptive, since that's what
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> I also have a shrink-wrapped copy of Redhat Linux 5.2 (Book and CD) that I picked up at a book fair
About 20 years ago I found a shrink wrapped O'reilly book and installation CD's for Redhat 3.3 in a university bookshop. It was an old release at the time so I of course picked it up!. I opened it and the quality of the paper in the book is very high, almost like vellum laid. I've been intending on installing it for a while now.
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Perhaps I was just a little too young to really get into Myst, but The 7th Guest really grabbed my attention! I never managed to beat the microscope puzzle, but it doesn't affect the story much to just skip it.
The song at the end (Skeletons in my Closet) is also excellent!
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At the end of the 80s cd players were affordable and disks were numerous. The first cd based gaming consoles / add ons were available as early as 1991. 32 bit age was cd dominated. New PS1 games were produced until 2004 (technically 2006 if you count Strider). CDs are still available en masse in many electronic stores around the world.
And if you count optical media as a whole they are still in use with the switch to complete online distribution repeatedly postponed.
I think they have done pretty well.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:3)
Yes, late 1980s, music CDs and played were very popular. But CD-ROMs and drives not so much. They became more available in 1991, but it still took a several years for them to become standard equipment on PCs. Most PC games had switched to CD by 1995-1996. Before that, there were still many floppy releases. Though I had to switch my 5.25in drive to the B: drive as most of those releases were on mot-so-floppy 3.5in.
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Ugh, it was such a horrible game. I think many people bought it precisely because it was on CD-ROM (thus new) and had a few full-motion-video sequences (thus new). Ie, spooky old mansion built by a spooky old toymaker, full of spooky puzzles: one would expect naturally that there would be spooky puzzles based upon toys. Maybe some fiendishly complicated set of clockworks to figure out. But noooo you have not-so-spooky puzzles based upon moving pennies on a board, and other puzzles no less mundane than tha
Re: Excuse me? (Score:2)
I agree it wasn't a great game, but it was technically impressive. I have a few other game CDs from that era. I would have to check my collection again. I know Wing Conmander 3 is one. But that came out later. And I'm more fond of Wing Commander 1 and 2.
I have Rebel Assault on CD. The graphics were decent for the time, but look terrible nowadays.
Some of my favorite games, the Lucasfilm Games adventure games, had CD reissued that I never knew about back then. For example, Monkey Island II (perhaps the first
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I played Monkey Island 2 before the first one. I think I got the Amiga version, with 11 floppy disks in the box (PC was only 5, but the ideas was to limit amount of floppy disk shuffling by having enough on 4 floppies loaded into RAM at once for 1/3 of the game). I don't think I have that around, and I don't remember when I got the PC version.
Monkey Island 1 I got as a CD-ROM version, which had the game music actually on the game CD as actual music tracks rather than playing via MIDI files (which made the
Re: Excuse me? (Score:2)
I was lucky enough to have a 20 MB hard drive on my first PC in 1987, and all subsequent ones as well. But it had CGA graphics and no sound card.
Simcity ran in 640x200 in black and white. Similar to what it was on some of the B&W Macs at the time.
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The first Apple Powerbook with a CD-ROM player was the 1400, released 1997. The timeline in the article is BS.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:2)
Apple was well behind the times in those days. I definitely had a CD-ROM drive in my desktop PC by 1993 when 7th Guest came out.
I've never owned a laptop or notebook, and probably never will. After 32 years doing it, I still prefer to build my own computers.
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That was CD-DA, Compact Disc Digital Audio [wikipedia.org], or plain old CD to almost everybody.
Even if you could connect a CD player to your computer in 1985, there wasn't really anything you could do with it. The 386 was only introduced in October of that year, VGA was still three years away, and SoundBlaster not till the year after that.
Re: Excuse me? (Score:3)
That's not correct. CD-DA came out in 1982. My father was one of the first to buy a player soon after. I was quite young, and can't remember the exact year or month, but I do know it was long before 1985. I believe the player was a Denon.
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Re: Excuse me? (Score:2)
That's nice, but this submission wasn't about you, it was about CD-ROM.
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Every Computer Chronicles episode is on Youtube and you can see this episode here: https://youtu.be/9NU_XI7fguI [youtu.be]
"Multimedia" (Score:3)
Re: "Multimedia" (Score:2)
Yes. And I also watch a fair amount of terrible Ultimotion video.
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Also fun but blocky cinepak codec stuff
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First videos I watched on a computer were animated gifs!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Re: "Multimedia" (Score:2)
I was gonna say mine were Videotex, but it was not really video. More like better than animated ASCII art. Maybe if there had been enough bandwidth to transmit it, there would have been actual something similar with Videotex back in the days.
On another subject, I wish the floppotron had been available back then. It sounded better than most games using the PC speaker. I wrote some code to plat 8 bit mono PCM on it using a timer ISR for some games that got published. But the volume was so low on most PC speak
Re: "Multimedia" (Score:2)
In 1992... (Score:2)
I remember, as a sophomore in in high school in 1992, our band director giving away a "CD Player" as a big prize! Maybe a year later I was buying big, fat Linux and programming books (SUSE, RedHat, C++, Assembly Language, OS design!) with CDs in them containing so much precious, juicy source code!
Then in college in '94, my mom gave me a massive bundle of classical music which I treasured dearly.
I was born in 1994 and honestly, technology changed so rapidly over my lifetime, from mainframes to the IoT, that
Re: In 1992... (Score:2)
I think you might have made a typo about being born in 1994. Going to college as a toddler would be quite the accomplishment. And the time machine for high school in 1992.
Joking aside, we're pretty close in age. Though I never went to college, I already had published code in 1992 that people are still running today in DOSbox. My CD collection is mostly classical, and about 800 discs. Nothing like my husband's 15000 disc's (not classical).
Nowadays I'm struggling to get open source software to properly play h
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1976! Whoops!
What instrument(s) do you play? I played trombone through college. I chose a career in programming though I desperately wanted to be a musician. My brother actually majored in music, became a high school band director.
Re: In 1992... (Score:2)
Piano and harpsichord, mainly. I have been learning them after programming. I also have a digital organ, but my foot coordination isn't isn't there for the pedal board. And we were born the same year. Things sure have changed !
Re: In 1992... (Score:2)
It's mister.
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It's mister.
With a five-digit UID, it’s “old timer”. Or maybe “Gramps”.
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Old timer, yes. And I was reading slashdot for a while before registering. Hard to say from the userid length alone what year it was. I want to say maybe 1999 or 2000. And my cats have always been fixed, so I'm not "gramps" :)
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Similar timeline as y'all have. I'm curious... did this bit strike you as a bit early?
"In terms of pure mindshare, 1994 might have been the year of Peak CD, with 17.5 million CD-ROM drives and $590 million in discs sold..."
In the early 90's, I had a cd-rom drive. Mid-90's, I got a 2x SCSI burner. But it wasn't until the late 90's that I was buying stacks of 50-100 disks, and had several burners (even a scsi 4 disk changer that could also burn). Maybe I was just lagging the scene, but I would have guessed peak CD was late 90's.
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Appreciate the clarification! I guess I was just late to the party
Re: In 1992... (Score:2)
By the late 1990s, there were DVDs, which were higher capacity. That's why it was clear CDs of any kind were not the future. Broadband was also not widely available yet. It was much lower speed than today. There was no practical video steaming until the mid 2000s or so
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Two machines from my collection:
1994 PowerMac 6100/60 AV: 750 MB CD-ROM drive, 250 MB SCSI Hard Disk. Optical Storage = 3x writable storage. Multimedia would open up your world to so much more information! Ethernet and Serial Port; 14.4 to 56K Modem
1999 iMac DV: 5 GB DVD-ROM drive, 10 GB IDE Hard Disk: Optical Storage = 1/2 writable storage. Optical disks are now software distribution. 100 MBit Ethernet; 3 MBit/Sec “broadband”, optional WiFi.
So much changed in the 1990s. Computers turned i
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what a journey (Score:3)
the progression in speed and capacity of processors and memory both volatile and non-volatile in all its forms, including mechanical hole filled paper things, transducers in tubes of mercury, magnetic tapes of all sizes and speeds, both massive and tiny spinning magnetic disks, lasers burning and reading things onto various spinning things of various sizes and speeds, and varieties of transistors baked onto things of incredibly small scale, often dominates my thoughts and brings me straight up awe.
fuck cds. think of this -- we've gone from around 80 byte punch cards at around 6,000 bps read only to over 1,000,000,000,000 byte NVME and 24,000,000,000 bps writeable in around 50 years
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another crazy thing is i just bought my first NVME drive (i know, i am old) and the tiny thing has like 2 major functional chips on it, and it holds 1TB.
that means we already have the storage density to fit 16tb of storage (way way way more than an entire household should ever need) in *quadruple* redundancy and around 100 GPS of read speed in a device the size of a deck of cards
AOL CDs (Score:4, Funny)
I'm still finding those freakin' AOL CDs in old boxes of computer stuff I have laying around. At one point I used them as Xmas decorations by threading the colored light bulbs from strands through the centers of the CDs (anyone remember the big Xmas 110v bulb strings).
Encarta wasn't awful (Score:2)
I think the MS product of that type I liked the most, though, was one they killed off to try and drive people over to Encarta - Microsoft Dinosaurs.
Fish disks on CD in the '90s (Score:3)
I remember when you could get the Fish disks on CD
And also Aminet CD's which I also bought from Fred
(anybody know if Fred Fish is still alive?)
Back then with only 33K6 modems downloading freely distributable software was slow, so it was useful having it on CD
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Things changed so quickly when CD-ROM collections became available. Building up a collection of PD disks used to take years, and we were always looking for ways to cut costs using calling cards for BBS systems and postal fraud for swapping floppy disks.
Then suddenly you could have an entire collection on one CD, 800 odd floppies worth. It was probably a bigger change than the switch from dial-up to broadband, at least for me.
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Fred Fish was my pipeline to freeware Amiga software.
I'm not sure I would call it happy (Score:4, Interesting)
And dear God the commodore CDTV and the CDI and even to a lesser extent the 3DO...
I just don't think CDs were worth it until Pentium CPUs and the PlayStation. An insane amount of money was spent trying to make the tech work long before it was capable of working. I mean imagine what commodore could have done if they hadn't wasted so much time and money on the blasted CDTV.
I think the tech just came along a little bit too early and people got too excited.
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I just didn't think the CD soundtrack (Score:2)
Look up Street Fighter II on the PC Engine. It's an Amazing port. It's also a 24mb cartridge on the PC Engine. You can count the number of games for the PC Engine / T
Re: I'm not sure I would call it happy (Score:2)
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True. We kind of needed an intermediate medium. We went from approx 1MB floppies to hundreds of MB on a CD. Nobody had any idea how to fill all that space. But floppies were really suffering from being too small. The likes of Wing Commander and The Secret Of Monkey Island 2 each took around a dozen disks.
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The PC Engine (Turbographx 16 in the US) was the first and best CD-ROM capable console. The CD-ROM add-on was released so early that it was before Red Book, so used a custom filesystem.
What made it great was that the PC Engine only has 196k of RAM to load the CD assets into, and wasn't really powerful enough to do FMV, and NEC didn't provide any tools for doing video. The result was fast loading games that used hand drawn pixel graphics to do any animations or intros, with CD music. Cartridge games with bet
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"Red Book" is the audio CD specification from the early '80s. IT predates the 1988 PC Engine CD-ROM2 peripheral.
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Okay, which ever one it was that was for storing a filesystem on the disc.
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You mean ISO9660? That was 1988, same year the CD-ROM2 was released. But ISO9660 isn't one of the "rainbow books", and is by no means the only filesystem used on CD-ROMs. For example UNIX installation media (e.g. for BSD-based Solaris 1.x) often used UDF on CD-ROM well after ISO9660 was a thing, and '90s MacOS installation media used straight HFS on CD-ROM.
UFS, not UDF (Score:2)
Gah, I obviously meant UNIX installation media used UFS on CD-ROM, not UDF which didn't exist yet. (Yes, there are also formats that use UDF on CD-ROM as well, like the so-called cDVD, which is more-or-less DVD video data on a CD-ROM.)
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Yes, as I recall it was published shortly after (or just before) the PC Engine CD-ROM add on was released.
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For me it was less the CDs for that era of games as it was the 3d art. The systems were so primitive early 3D art in games just looked terrible. Even at the time I preferred the pixel art that came before it.
Re:I'm not sure I would call it happy (Score:4, Insightful)
The benefit to CDs as console medium were that they were cheap as fuck to produce.
If you wanted to put out an NES or SNES game, you had to guess how many you'd sell. It would take months to produce them at a high price point per unit.
If your game undersold, you were sitting on expensive stock. If your game was popular, you might spend months getting new stock to stores, praying that the hype wouldn't die out.
CDs, on the other hand, were pennies per. And you could stamp out a whole manufacturing run in a weekend.
The switch from cartridge to CD (and the way it broke Nintendo's associated stranglehold, like their limiting to how many games you could put out per year, and so on) produced a lot of shovelware, sure.
But it also produced a magical time of experimentation.
Re: I'm not sure I would call it happy (Score:2)
"Yeah we got the PlayStation out of that but those early CD systems were kind of terrible."
Notably, the PlayStation and PS1 both had crap laser units that would fail partially and then fully, they were the reason that you would have to invert your console to get it to read discs. Something about the voice coil suspension would fail even when the consoles were treated well. I never have understood how one of the two companies which collaborated on inventing the CD could be so shit at making drives, but Sony
floppies and cds (Score:2)
At first mail order shareware on floppies
then Slackware, Debian and Redhat on CD ,
ah, those were the days
(still have a usb dvd drive, just in case)
Oblivion/2 (Score:2)
That was about the year, or perhaps it was 93, where I pulled a copy of Obv/2 off of a shareware CD and setup my first BBS.
I had been wanting to do so for a while, but I didn't want it to look and behave like my friends ( who were using WWIV I believe ). When I stumbled on Obv/2 I was instantly in love with what I now know was the templating system. So much better than wwiv, to the extent that I actually saved up the cash to buy an official copy of the software.
Indeed, my bbs was lightyears better than mo
Lotus Marketplace, the (Almost) CD-ROM Killer App (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a company, in the 90's, that did promotional mailings (among other things).
Junkmail was a weird business back in the day. If you needed a list of addresses, you'd contract with a broker who'd sell you a one-time-use set, based on pretty basic criteria. The addresses came on preprinted adhesive labels (hence the one-time-use), and they always had "ringer" addresses in them, so they'd know if someone tried to use a list more than once. It was slow (you had to have the lists shipped to you) and expensive.
Then Lotus released Marketplace [wikipedia.org], which was a huge set of CD-ROMs that you could generate lists from, that had pretty granular search terms available. It'd do the search, make a modem connection to a billing server, debit your credit card and spit out the list more cheaply than standard alternatives. Or, at least, that was the idea.
One problem was that it was, due to the nature of CD-ROM, terribly slow. It could take hours, even days to run on normal hardware. And then you had to have a human around to do disc swaps. We had no night shift, so that slowed the process down even more. My boss told me to make it faster, don't worry about expense.
OK, first thing to try - get the fastest multispeed drive, which I think was an 8x at the time. Shaved things down incrementally. Faster, said the boss.
Next attempt: install a SCSI interface, and get a SCSI CD-ROM drive. That cut things down by like half - which was pretty great if you didn't get bitten by a required disc swap. Original IDE was just a horrible technology, and it bogged down the entire computer. SCSI busmastered - it didn't need the CPU, so it flew in comparison. Nonetheless, faster, said the boss.
Next attempt: use a CD changer that had virtual drive letters, SCSI. That worked really well - the Lotus software would just look at every "mounted" volume until it found what it needed - and allowed for things to run overnight. That satisfied the boss for a while, but even that wasn't fast enough before long. And then the penny dropped, and I found the ultimate solution.
I got the biggest SCSI drive I could get - I think it was like 8 gigabytes - and I divided it up into as many partitions as there were CD-ROMs. I don't think I even needed to name the resulting volumes. I copied each CD-ROM onto dedicated partitions. I ran the software on a sample search that typically took about an hour... and it completed in less than a minute.
I got a raise.
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This was in 1990-1991, if my memory serves. None of your solutions were available, or viable, in those days. I think people forget just how limited and/or expensive tech was at that point.
A file server was exotic, expensive, loud, and meant an expensive Netware license - unless you used a DOS or Windows solution, which were non-performant. Oh, and Netware was cryptic voodoo.
NT wouldn't exist for another two years. Unix? That was for very deep pockets indeed, and it was considered beyond the capabilities of
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Nice solution. That 8G SCSI drive must have cost several arms and legs.
Did you have to trick the software in any way into thinking it was running on a CD not a disk? And what was the platform?
Conspiracy? (Score:2)
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Old days (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Old days (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish the tech world were as fun and innovative as it was. I used to be excited about what technology might come next. Now I can hardly care. The electronics section of every store has looked the exact same for about 20 years now. Advances in software arent as fun as advances in hardware.
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The 80s was a demonstrate market viability era and the 90s was a build-out the market era. Those are exciting times, and we should be thankful for being there to witness it.
Now it's just market maturation, which is never as exciting or interesting.
CDROMs in PC Magazines (Score:2)
I remember getting all my free software back in the 90s via free CDROMs included with all the Mac/PC/Web magazines. A lot of them I only bought because of the CD included under the plastic wrap. Had to check it was still there and not stolen already. There were even CDROM only multimedia magazines. I think the one I remember was called Blender.
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Blender? If it's the same Blender (1994) it is still alive and doing well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Wing Commander III (Score:2)
I'll raise you (Score:2)
Pssh, Phantasmagoria was on 7 discs. Instead of sleeves or jewel cases, the discs came in a little binder.
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Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight 2 were great games...bad acting, but they brought that idea of live acting instead of animations to games. The sad thing is that you can't get the old Windows versions of those games to run, it's the old DOS versions that you see that can run, because 16 bit libraries are not included in 64 bit WIndows. I should set up Windows 3.1 in a VM and see if I can get my old Phantasmagoria to actually run on it.
El-Torito deserves a mention (Score:3, Interesting)
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Shovelware wasn't too bad, back in the late 1990s (Score:3)
Around the late 1990s, a lot of stores were selling "shovelware" packs of CD-ROMs. For example, a blister pack with seven CDs on it, one CD being all the Ultima games (1-7) for the PC, another CD having Doom, Doom 2, and Doom 2 Master levels, which came with like a thousand WAD files, a ton of them actually worth playing. All for like $10.
I sort of miss those because one could buy a ton of games that were fairly playable (even with dosemu) and got a high bang/buck ratio. Now, the closest thing is probably GOG/Steam sales.
Wait, what? CD-ROM is gone? (Score:3)
I still use it.
I collect CD-ROM and DVD-ROM encyclopaedias. You'd be surprised what software gets mixed in with audio CD's in charity shops. I had been looking for Encata 95 for a long time, I had already found 98 and several Brittanicas. Just walked into a seaside charity shop and Encata 95 was tucked up against the wall, I nearly missed it.
My first experience of "data from outside" was with CD-ROM. Sure, I had been buying magazines with floppy coverdisks for years, but they just usually had software on it. I remember debating as a 15 year old about if I should spend my birthday money on a CD-ROM drive or not. I eventually decided that the floppy based magazines would just drop floppies and go cover the CD route so I bought one, with a soundcard for the IDE controller.
I then found a shareware CD-ROM which was full of BBS files, having largely missed the BBS era I found myself spending literally hours digging through all 650MB of that data, game demos, add-ons for windows and DOS programs plus a load of text files covering loads of subjects and my introduction to PGP. To this day I still see CD and DVD in a kind of romantic light, diving deep into the contents of a plastic disc.
Besides typically storing my archive data on BD-R these days I still collect reference materials on CD/DVD and burn to them too although I usually burn audio to CD-R/RW.
There is nothing better than navigating through read only optical media. LASERS BABY!
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LTO tape is good, but few people have readers for it, and every few years LTO introduce a new format, discarding the one-before-last, so in addition to archiving tapes you have to archive drives.
I would like an LTO2 drive with SAS interface. (And a DAT72 drive with ESATA interface).
Yes, I have a PiDP8 - but no DECtape.
Contrary to what Google A
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> in addition to archiving tapes you have to archive drives.
Becomes even messier between LTO 7 and 8.
Anyway, the archive should be moved forward with the drives. Where I work I have to do that where nobody did it before, I'm moving everything from DDS upwards.
The oldest DDS tapes work just fine and all the DDS3 and 4 drives are all in top notch condition.
In fact, I've had ore problems with the newer hardware, the DAT72 drives and many LTO drives. The issues are with the power supplies, many of which se
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I collect CD-ROM and DVD-ROM encyclopaedias.
This is the nerdiest thing I have heard today, and I mean that in a good way. You win today's slashdot.
CD-ROM also transformed gardens (Score:2)
CD-ROM also had an environmental impact as it flourished in trees to keep away birds from fruit trees.
mp3 killed music cds (Score:2)
zip disks tho (Score:2)
Incorrect timeline (Score:5, Informative)
From my perspective, while '93-94 was when CD-ROMs started going mainstream, they did so in a big way. It wasn't just Myst; many other computer games like Half-Life, The 7th Guest, and Day of the Tentacle were released on CD-ROM. This format became universal for games for many years, and the same applied to applications like Office and Windows.
Even by 2001, many users were still on slow internet connections where downloading large files took a long time. It became mainstream to download MP3s, often to burn them onto CD-ROMs for use in portable disc players. The same was true for pirated software, which was also burned onto CDs. The primary method for commercial software distribution remained physical media.
As bandwidth started catching up, DVD-ROMs became mainstream around 2002-2003 with most systems shipping with such a drive buil-tin. DVDs could hold up to 8 GB, making them a superior format for distributing operating systems, applications, games, and movies in higher quality than before. Downloading such large files was still quite infeasible for most users.
Digital downloads of cutting-edge games only began to gain traction around this time. For instance, Steam was launched in fall 2003, and Half-Life 2 in fall 2004 was a notable early success. However, physical media continued to coexist with digital downloads for several years. I remember buying games that were available ONLY on DVD as late as 2010. Then came the next shift: Blu-ray which never saw success on the PC but continues to be the dominant form for console.
It wasn't until June 2012 that Apple shipped the first MacBook without a built-in CD/DVD drive, highlighting the significant role that optical media played up until that time.
So to summarize: CD-ROM's had a huge impact and was the main delivery format for many years. It wasn't a flop or unnecessarily hyped-up thing: it delivered. And it wasn't the internet that wiped it out - it was higher-capacity optical media, DVD-ROM's, which continued to be mainstream for software delivery until 2010-ish.
Re: Incorrect timeline (Score:2)
it wasn't really the internet that killed CD-ROMs; it was DVDs.
This.
You are going to be hard-pressed to deliver the Snap package for "Hello world" on a CD.
Re: (Score:2)
People forget that before CD-ROM, which held 650-700MB, you had the 3.5 inch floppy which held only 1.44MB. The move to CD-ROM allowed the amount of content in any software package to really grow and not be limited by how annoying 50 floppies would be for a software installation.
Next up - Zip drive (Score:3)
The short life of the Iomega Zip Drive
Re: (Score:2)
I had a SCSI (pronounced “sexy”) Zip 100, and a USB Zip 250. I wonder if my old Zip disks are still readable.
No mention of Sierra games (Score:2)
I remember games like Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight 2 that took advantage of all the space available on CD-ROM compared to the 1.44MB of space on a 3.5 inch floppy.
Brittanica (Score:2)
As CD's go, I honestly barely remember the awesomeness of Myst. What sticks out most in my mind is the encyclopedias on CD, specifically Brittanica. I remember competing with my dad to see which approach was faster - running to the bookshelf, pulling the correct volume and finding a topic, or loading up the CD-ROM and finding it. The old school version was consistently faster, unless the CD was already spun up and opened.
CD-ROM the floppy disc of the future? (Score:2)
rumors of death (Score:2)
The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. -- C.D. Rom.
When I get an x-ray or other medical imaging, can I download the images? Nope. Can I get them emailed to me? Nope (except some dentists). Can I get them on a thumb drive? Nope. The only one and only way I can get those images is on a CD, or if it's really huge, a DVD.
You're an idiot (Score:3)
And I'll keep buying CDs. Since, if I'm buying music from a musician/band, that's how they make their money. Streaming? For fractions of a penny a play?
Oh, and you're going to guarantee that when I want to play someone who's CD I bought 20 years ago, it's going to be streaming?