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Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

Interesting fact is that DSL used to be 50MB because that’s how big a business-card sized CDs were. And yes, there used to be business-card sized CDs.

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Wow, I completely forgot about this! You just teleported me back in time for a minute there.

For anyone else interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

Yes, this took me back 25 years! My favorite use of these was by Upper Deck, the company that sells (sold?) baseball trading cards. Their 1999-2000 PowerDeck series was these baseball card size CD-ROMs that presented something like a DVD movie menu and could play a couple of highlight reels of the player.

http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/1999_Upper_Deck_P...

http://www.baseballcardpedia.com/index.php/2000_Upper_Deck_P...

What an unfortunate acronym...

Yeah the British Broadcasting Company must be cheesed off with it

I remember an Energizer battery game coming on one of these disks - the only time I'd ever seen one.

I still have a stack of these lying around. I used them in high school for carrying a live Linux distro in my wallet to use on the school computers since the BIOSs were too old to support booting from USB. Needless to say, the school district IT department was not happy with me.

Nice! When I was in high school I made myself a duct tape wallet that could hold a few floppy diskettes so I could carry Floppix with me (a very limited distro on two floppy disks). I think at one point I also had a Win98 repair floppy crammed in there too with some extra DOS utilities on it. Four megabytes in my pocket felt a lot more useful back then.

While I am thankful for the increased local storage space available today I do not care to use it for storing giant executables and libraries. I prefer to use it for storing data.

Not a fan of storing data on someone else's computers, otherwise known as "the cloud".

Or unnecessarily running software from someone else's computers where I could just as easily run it locally, with better speed and reliability, otherwise known as "software as a service".

The DSL in my wallet saved my bacon once when I was scheduled to teach a one evening intro to unix tools class in a room with all Windows machines.

A different way of saying the same thing: business-card sized and shaped.

those used to make the most horrible noise when you actually use them

They weren't too great with vertically mounted drives or slot-loading drives, either.

they werent too great period :)

I feel like slot loading drives were kind of a later thing, though— I only ever saw them in cars until after the Nintendo Wii in 2006. Other than the iMac, computer drives always had trays.

Apple like to suck.

Only if you had one of those fancy high-speed drives. They were nice and quiet at 2x.

I hadn't seen the rectangular ones (just the chorded circle ones) until I bought a bunch and received these:

https://twitter.com/systems_glitch/status/169651986595858851...

I had a copy of DSL on one of those!

You still see them sometimes for drivers.

Those are slightly different - mini CDs. The ones the OP was talking about were a weird oblong shape.

How could a CD not be round?

Only the inner part where you can draw a circle contains actual data. The rest is just blank, but as long as it’s balanced it works just fine.

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