To me, CDRW was the thing that changed everything... yeah sure, i could burn a CD some time before that too, but every file, every video, song, etc., was measured literally in money for blank CDs, and it was relatively expensive.

CDRW? 2MB file? Meh, just burn it, lend it to a friend, get it back, erase, 50meg file, other friend, get some other random stuff back, etc.

Then flash storage became cheap and the CDs slowly died (well, there were iomega zips and other stuff in between, but not really that popular).