The short, happy reign of CD-ROM
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fastcompany.com
Now I open a program, it reaches out to the internet, maybe I get some crappy spinner that is intermittently doing a thing, it's an inconstant experience. Content provided is of course faster and there's incalculably more information available.
But that process / time of loading up a big CD felt so good compared to the current experience.
I work on web apps and no amount of work ever seems to provide the positive feedback / loading experience of a CD-ROM. There's just no spinner or progress bar that seems that direct or satisfying.
And that was only spinning at 1x; later faster data drives were weirdly powerful. I had a little experience with a 24x drive in a laptop and you didn't dare move it while the disc was spinning. Thankfully they never went faster than that in portables; a 48x slimline would've been dangerous.
It's great how quiet computers are now, but there was something to being able to hear the computer thinking too.
Silence is nice too though.
I never used to be able to hear the fans, but now that everything is solid state, they're the one constant. And it worries me occasionally when they kick on for no discernable reason.
So i interpreted the HDD seeking noise as the sound of those switches. :D
Something about all those chunky CRT or VFD screens fiercely glowing feels, to me, much better and futuristic than, say the sleek transparent holographic flatscreens of the new Star Trek properties.
Yes, that’s unfortunate.
Offline physical drives still exist in some areas; I keep my nintendo switch mostly in airplane mode and use cartridges. SD card slot made a surprising return to Macbook Pros. Even CDs have their direct successors, e.g. M-Discs[1] are popular for long term data storage.
But yes, none of that exists in the realm of web apps.
My bbs probably switched CDs every 6 months.
Even in the 28.8K modem era, people didn't suck down everything they could, partly due to time, partly due to storage space (eg: the reason I used CDs instead of big drives is because big drives were very expensive), so the life of these was pretty long. The software was also not rapidly changing, probably because distribution was harder (so: get it right the first time), and also partly because it was mostly for offline use (no network, servers, etc to stay in sync with or worry about remote vulnerabilities from).
But what they definitely had going for them is that they were dirt cheap. Nobody thought twice to burn a CD with some photos for their friends; USB thumb drives are of course much faster and higher capacity, but also not something you'd gladly part with several times a month.
Another big advantage that media-based software (like console video games) had in pre-Internet times was that it was mostly self-contained. These days, consoles might still support physical media, but they serves more as DRM authentication tokens; once you insert a disk or cartridge, it's minutes of installation to hard disk and potentially hours of fetching updates from the Internet.
That's really less of a feature of disks though, and more about the practical inability to patch software once it was shipped. That definitely made QA a lot more thorough than it is today.
I’m the opposite. What I fear is the dozens of content providers (YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, etc.) suddenly removing or blocking access to their content. I keep a local copy of everything I can.
Since there is no photosensitive dye involved on the final prerecorded disc, this makes them orders of magnitude more durable. That dye is what breaks down over time on CD-Rs, making them unreadable.
I never experienced such durability of floppies. here 10% where DOA, and a disk which survived 3 years was a venerable older one. Maybe the warm, humid and dusty air in here?
Do note that some media has a sweet spot recording speed - apparently (as I recently rediscovered in practice), DVD-Rs don't like to be burned too slowly neither.
DVDs were pretty much the opposite. I burned a lot of DVD coasters. Had even more that failed a few months into service. Dual-layer were so expensive for the good blanks, and so dismally unreliable for the cheap blanks, that I seldom bothered -- two mid-grade single-layer discs were cheaper and more reliable.
Floppies have been hit-or-miss for me, they're more susceptible to mildew if stored in a damp basement, and cleaning solutions are a you-get-one-shot affair since you have to cut open the jacket and remove the flexible media. But if kept dry, I've had decent (95%?) success rates from mid-80s-to-early-90s floppies. A drive cleaning disc is essential.
I found a movie I should have access to through Netflix but their new tier system made it unavailable unless I upgraded.
I had a friend barf in my box of cds once. It was a long evening of washing, spraying, and buffing.
In my experience, it wasn't that much of a problem, since unlike HDDs the latency was very predictable (subject to CD drive speed), so programs were written just fine to handle it.
(It probably also helped that the average CD drive speed was faster than the worst-case drive that the program designed for)
I still think developers should be forbidden from having SSDs so they stop writing such terrible programs.
What's funny is that I can't remember when I scratched a CD enough for it to have any noticeable effect. Even the ones my neanderthal friends handled and returned covered in fine scratches worked fine. But it might be just because I kept everything in the original holders and made so many copies of everything; it's possible I just never noticed. I've had the actual disc readers burn out, though (looking at you, Fat PS2).
Man, I loved burning CDs. It felt like magic every time. My whole family was into it. I'd sit there the family's stack of slim jewelcases and spindle of Maxwell CD-RWs. Listening to the satisfying BRRRR and minutes later, out pops your warm copy fresh from the oven. I don't miss the random compatibility and disc protection errors. But when it worked, it was so sick.
I still use optical media once in a while. I've got quite a collection of readers, stacked on a shelf in the garage. And a few discs with data on them and a stash of empty discs waiting to be burned.
If you miss it, just buy an external Blu-ray writer. 25 to, what, 100 GB per disk is not too bad for the really important stuff.
They're not mutually exclusive with other forms of backups.
There is also benefit of locally stored data. You can store them in hard drive, although sometimes external media can be helpful too, rather than needing to use internet for any transfers.
I guess the electric car is the internet and the valiant is the cd rom? Although the valiant was more of a steam train to me haha.
There is no contemporaneous equivalent.
Believe it or not, thanks to ScummVM being in the iOS/iPad OS App Store now, I have actually played that game on my iPad. You'd be amazed at how well it's held up. It looks really good on an iPad, and the point and click nature of it fits touchscreens perfectly.
"You're going to listen to this U2 album, and you're going to like it!" -- Tim Apple
Studs from Microsoft was a parody of this format, with the "studs" replaced by Microsoft programming nerds, from Seattle area sketch comedy show Almost Live!. It is also notable for featuring a pre-Science-Guy Bill Nye.
dang has talked about this before, but there are a number of users who were rightfully banned, go on to post nothing but healthy, constructive comments that almost always get vouched, and then immediately turn abusive again when they're unbanned. So the current moderation philosophy is to leave them banned and let users vouch their comments, which works out better for everyone.
They were fun to run through.
D: disc1, E: disc2, F: disc3, G: disc4, H:empty I:empty: J:empty.
The game was kind enough to let you specify different drives for the discs rather than assuming a single swapping situation, though it would check them all at launch time, which was quite a slow affair. But once it was going, it was great; as you moved between regions in the game, the drive would simply change discs and spin up the new one and away you went.
ISTR they did a certain amount of duplication, some overlap between regions would be on both discs, so it wouldn't require swapping constantly if you were right on a border. But at some points it would flip back and forth, and the changer made all the difference.
I think you're right that some of the data was duplicated. I can't remember if any other multi-cd games allowed assigning different drive letters to different discs. Also works with DOSbox
I had all the other major consoles at the time except the Sega CD so I never got to own it at home, but the idea of playing through an actual episode of Power Rangers while pressing buttons that correspond to the actions taken by the actual characters just felt so cool. All the other Power Rangers games were either fighting games or belt-scroll beat-'em-ups, but this one let me play through an actual episode!
...and then I emulated it as an adult and realized it was just a pile of QTEs with no real game and that the video quality was abject dogshit. But the beat-'em-ups still hold up, to the point where they're making a new one now.
So every month we'd burn, IIRC, nearly a thousand CDs and ship them out, mostly around the US. We were in a weird size where we had low enough volume and needed quick enough turn around, that going to big CD duplicators weren't really an option.
Anyone remember the Taiyo Yuden CD-R media? We spent a very long time trying various media and eventually settled on it as "the perfect CD-R". We spent years trouble-shooting problems that different people had, even paying people to ship defective media back to us so we could identify if it was burning problems or shipping problems. We had a shelving unit full of SFF PCs with CD-RW drives and some custom software I wrote that would burn, and verify the media.
Our shipped-defect rate went way down when I built some custom verification software. Initially I was just doing an "dd | md5sum" of the CD drive, after ejecting and re-loading the disc. But we eventually tracked user problems down to some drives having sporadic problems reading some sectors, which our drives would try several times and eventually get a good read of.
My new verification used low-level SCSI commands to read every block of data and get timing information, and if any sector took more than X ms to read, or more than Y sectors took more than X/5 ms to read, it would "fail" the disc. At this point we basically never had people reporting issues with the media.
Taiyo Yuden discs seemed to be the sweet spot between low cost and low defect rate.
If only we had more high-quality companies like them that didn't get bought out or enshittify their products.
There was another thing called jigdo, "jigsaw downloader", which would take a collection of files in a filesystem, and use them as the source to reconstruct a bit-perfect ISO. You could put the .jigdo file on the media itself, and the recipient could read the files, discarding the ones that failed, and (perhaps automatically?I don't remember this part) fetch only the failed ones over the internet, and reconstruct the original .ISO that you meant for them to have in the first place, with hopefully only a few minutes of dialup time.
Later, I found that BitTorrent could accomplish something similar. You could pre-seed your local copy of a torrent with burned media, flawed or perfect, didn't matter, just copy it to a writable hard drive. Launch your torrent client and point it to the "existing files on disk", and do a "force re-check", and it would go through and verify every block checksum according to the .torrent itself, joining the swarm to fetch the ones that failed and seed the ones that matched. In this way, if you had several discs with nonoverlapping errors, even without internet reachability, you could use local peer discovery make a LAN-only swarm and your clients would all share blocks and correct each other into all having a perfect copy.
I used this when I had a big pile of files that I wanted to hand out hundreds of copies of, to a hopefully-technically-savvy audience. Time was of the essence so I was burning at max speed and making my share of coasters, but I kept the failed burns, making sure that the .torrent itself on disc and the README describing this concept were readable, even if the rest of the burn was trash, and those were the ones I'd hand to people I knew could handle it. Sure enough, that evening I popped online and saw that a handful people had joined the swarm, most with a 99%-complete-already copy of the files, and they reached 100% in very short order, even the ones on dialup.
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.
I mean, say what you will about Steam's server bandwidth, it's at least higher bandwidth than the postal service.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
I don't actually like marshmallows enough, so I would probably enjoy two marshmallows less than a single one. Definitely less than twice as much as a single one.
And: given that you are in a psychological experiment, who knows what cruel twists of the experiment the scientists are trying to inflict on you? Perhaps they are actually studying how angry you are going to get when they break their promise? Just eat the damn thing, and they'll have a much harder time taking it away from you.
https://behavioralscientist.org/try-to-resist-misinterpretin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/n...
Also, it's probably still true, using the latest LTO tapes.
Yes a container of tapes is a lot of data, but how long would that reasonably take to write to tape? How many tape drives could you realistically have attached to the host system ?
· Start with an 80-slot 6U form-factor Base Library Module, and add up to 6 Expansion Library Modules for a total of 560 slots in a 42U rack form factor
· 25.2PB of total maximum compressed capacity with 560 slots and LTO-9 drives
· Performance scaling from 1 to 42 LTO HH Tape Drives and transfer rates of 300 MB/s per LTO-9 Tape Drive.
https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04111416.html?jumpid=in_pdp-p...
Does the robot armature in the enclosure swapping tapes around in Schwarzenegger's Eraser count?
Thanks for the example, that is a lot of tape and a lot of throughput.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41z8_qPOrJE Mail slot ie loading/unloading thingy, so you don't need to open it
https://youtu.be/sYgnCWOVysY?t=92 TS4500 itself
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JZALEYPD TS4500 data sheet for even more impressive numbers:
- Number of drives ... Up to 128 per library
- Capacity* with 3592 advanced cartridges ... Up to 877.5 PB native
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9boQn3nHnCA "27PB in the rack"
One problem with what you're suggesting is that everyone has a different steam library. If Valve offered a service where they could send you an update pack for your library every week or month, it would require a custom build for each customer. Is that something that would even be affordable?
That’s probably because they’re sold on Blu Ray discs though. If you had cartridge based consoles maybe you could have gigantic games nowadays.
Actually…couldn’t you have gigantic terabyte games anyway? I’m not aware of Steam or any of the consoles restricting game data size…
Hmmm
Best I can find is that the cartridge is limited to 32 GB, though whether that's because it's just SDHC under the hood or there wasn't a reason to make a larger one yet, I don't know.
One problem with flash memory is that it starts getting surprisingly expensive when you need it to be large, fast, and reliable.
Shipping physical media takes a lot longer than 30 minutes..
Most games are a lot faster to download for me than 30 minutes, and updates are typically even faster. (But then, we got fibre to the home here. I guess that's less common in the less developed countries of North America or Europe?)
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.
They will do new one right there and if there is no time - there is no time to mail stuff around.
What kind of nerd fantasy is it?
I went once with x-ray on cd that was weeks old for procedure - doctor there went “yeah cool, I don’t care, it is my risk we do new one by personel I know on equipment I know”.
They want scans/tests from trusted source to make decisions about person health/life. The only thing they can trust is whatever they have close and used for years.
If there is no time to get a new scan/test I think there is no time to download stuff or wait for someone to email things.
I brought my CT scans on disc to my ortho who didn't have a CT machine in the last 300 days.
If it's indeed a life saving situation as you say, a doctor will have to do scans there and not wait to receive possibly outdated imaging data from another country
Also, no hospital in my country is just gonna release my private medical records on the spot because a doctor from another country called and told them to. There's some formal paperwork that needs to be signed by the pacient and if you're in a coma then you can't sign it and if it's an emergency you don't have time for that whole process so they'll have to perform the scans there.
The case of having to quickly send/receive pacient data to or from doctors abroad is not something most public hospitals in my country are prepped for not will they since it's super niche case and in case of emergency they'll do the scans on the spot.
Not in my country. Due to strong data protection regulations most radiology shops don't Email the x-ray files to you. They either send it directly to your GP via the official government mandated channel, or they hand it to you physically in print or disc but never email due to the chance of not arriving to its destination or worse, going to someone else due to human or technical errors.
>The vast majority of PCs and laptops don't come with optical drives and that's been the case for many years now.
That's irelevant because they're not made for you to read them at home but for your doctor or other healthcare facilities to read them, and all these businesses have disc drives on premises and will most likely do so for decades
For what these places charge they should be giving out USB drives like candy. They are so cheap that Micro Center sells 64gb at the counter for like $3 or something. CD/DVD is not a valid option.
Optical media has the native feature of being written in immutable sessions so your older data is always preserved instead of overwritten(excluding RW media), and also can be write protected when desired by finalizing the session, plus its long data retention shelf life for archiving purposes compared to cheap flash, all make it a great choice for the uses cases of the medical industry file transfer or personal archival at home.
Sources? That seems way too low.
I would expect most people have at least one CD hidden somewhere in an attic or similar.
I don't have an optical drive connected to any working PC (nor a music CD player) myself, but I still have some CDs lying around the house. Eg a book about learning guitar that I bought second-hand came with a CD.
I have a PERL Cookbook with a mint CD sealed in the cover.
If you restrict to 'drives connected to a multi-purpose device so they can eg display medical images sent on disk' the percentage goes lower (but not sure whether all the way to 1%), because most people wouldn't try to use their game consoles for that.
I imagine it's still far from most, but it's definitely starting to be a thing.
Apart from some very old laptop (which might or might not work), my household doesn't have any CD nor DVD nor Blu-Ray etc drives. No car either, so we couldn't have a CD player in there.
I just doubt these optical-drive-less households like mine form 99% of all households.
I don't understand why they can't just load it on a website (like MyChart) like any other lab data. The images are big (contains more than pixel data, like xyz layers and gamma) but still compressible.
I don't know if it's HIPAA or tradition, but it really bugs me that I have to keep a DVD drive around solely for imaging. It's like the situation with the IRS and faxing :(
Also learned that a PS4 (or was it a PS5?) cannot open PDFs :(
While you're alive, you can just buy a couple of NAS, stash one at a friend's/parent's place, buy the cheapest $/TB storage, use raidz to automatically correct errors over time, and set it up to email you every time it had to resiver to a hot spare so you can buy another HDD
>only a fool would trust them to last
Heh, head over to /r/DataHoarder to see more of that. "but this time it's different, my coasters don't use organic dyes!"
It automatically replaces the dead drive with a hot spare over a couple of days. You can also do it in a couple of hours with dRAID: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Basic%20Concepts/dRAI...
You just need a couple of parity drives per vdev and one hot spare for the whole array
Could you explain this? Why would they do that?
- It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
- If anything in your NAS was relevant to the family, your SO would have kept a copy of it in her icloud instead of using your self-hosted photo viewer over tailscale
- Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using modern software and file formats. Accessing your data will be incredibly inconvenient
This isn't true. Sure, no one uses WMV or ZOO these days, but you can still get tools to read them. But those were also not-so-popular formats/codecs that were replaced quickly by better stuff. MP3 is also old, but still very ubiquitous. Furthermore, the specs and software for modern file formats (like audio/video codecs) are all publicly available. People will still be able to read h.264 videos 50 years from now, don't worry.
It's not going to be like the Domesday Book.
Yes, but nobody said "let's get back and reencode everything in a new, better format"
> - It's unlikely that your grandkids would have the same interests as you
The bar is pretty low: your grandkids only need to be interested enough to keep some tiny amounts of data around. (Assuming that data capacities keep growing, your perhaps dozen of TiB of data will fit on a thumb drive in the future, or perhaps even an email attachment.)
Also your descendants don't need to find your data interesting for the same reasons you do. You might snap some pictures of your travels to famous landmarks (which your grand kids don't care about, because they can't find much better photos of the Eiffel Tower online), but they might be interested in how fashion changed over time, or weight or smartphones or whatever is in the background.
- people with interesting lives
- people who meticulously archive and backup all their personal data
is close to 0. You're either doing or you're preserving, so if you preserve what you do, you aren't doing anything worth preserving.
Btw, there's lots of diaries and autobiographies published. Some of them quite popular.
Keep in mind: old data is tiny by contemporary standards. So your grandchildren can just take the few TiB in your personal collection, and stick it on a futuristic thumb-drive somewhere. Barely takes up any space.
That's a good point actually. Most people aren't going to care at all, but historians might, plus also movie-makers: it would be really useful to them to see real photos and footage from the far past.
Note also how typically the ads are the most fascinating parts of old media, be that newspapers or even TV recordings. All while contemporary arts are universally seen as annoying.
Ads are all annoying, contemporary or not. The old ones are only interesting because they're novel, and you're not watching them every day. You can see the same thing by traveling (or better yet, moving) to a foreign country and watching the TV ads there: they'll be interesting or entertaining for a few minutes, but will quickly become annoying after the novelty wears off.
Ads in old Computer Shopper magazines are interesting to people here because they're interested in computers and computer history, but they're not interesting to other people. But again, after you've looked through an old magazine full of these things, you'll tire of them.
As for ads being more interesting than "old media", that depends on the media. If it's classic old movies like Hitchcock thrillers or whatever, then definitely not. Movies like that are interesting and entertaining to watch even today. No one in their right mind wants to watch 2 hours of nonstop TV ads from the 1950s, by comparison.
Other stuff, it really depends on your interest, and how useful the information is to you now. Are you just satisfying curiosity about history? Or trying to solve some kind of problem that requires historical knowledge? Whatever you're researching is probably more interesting than the ads, though those might be interesting on their own too, to an extent.
It's fun, but it's not for everyone.
Likely only the now deceased owner knew that they had xyz special material. Their kin processing their attic or garage likely don’t.
Here we are talking about data.
So your NAS idea is probably the best with the caveat at your need to upgrade it regularly as well.
Compare it to a floppy disc from your grandparents. Not that bad for 3,5"? How about 5,25"? No? Then 8". These are now hard to come by. And this is just in the time span of 30-50 years.
The best bulk storage format was actually available early on and very shelf stable if treated reasonably: Paper tape. Low density and readers are hard to come by today.
Your primary point that our grandkids won't care is on point. We would drown if we keep everything. But the counter point would be that if we do not even try to preserve anything we would probably end up with nothing.
But for every average Joe who does not care we seem to have plenty data hoarders to make up for that.
Imagine how much of your life can be wiped out by a Carrington Event, which is not that unlikely.
I don't trust clouds for this. Right now, archival-grade DVDs are not a bad option. Almost 5 GB, and under good storage conditions these can last >50 years, probably more.
Tape would be pretty good, wouldn't it? Or magneto-optical media.
An example drive would be Asus BW-16D1X-U.
It is supported by the major drive manufacturers but it seem the media is only produced by CNC Magnetics or Mitsubishi Chemical. Sold by brands such as Verbatim or Ritek.
It is rated for 100+ years.
The variant is called M-Disc: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Discs: https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/ https://www.ridata.com/M-DISC/eng/index.asp
Blu-ray license list: https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-list/discmanuid-licenseeli...
The hard part will actually be to get hardware in 100 years which can read this. So it will not be write and forget. But reasonable shelf life should at least be available.
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.
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.
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.
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…):
The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.
1994 was still solidly in the floppy era, and getting a CD-ROM was huge, even larger than some hard drives at the time.
If you had a CD-ROM drive in 1994, you were king.
"Peak of new people having access to their first cdrom drive"... hmm.
"Peak of this new thing totally changing the game, even if it gets more popular later, because it's mundane by the time that happens."?
"Peak of breathless press releases about MuLtImEdIa Cd-RoM"... That's probably it.
CD-ROM drives first started not being put in Mac laptops in 2008, so the peak "units sold" would have been somewhere in the early 2000s. But by then Internet speeds were fast enough and other methods existed, so they were waning in popularity/excitement.
Edit: I also remember that this computer came with a FMV game on CD. The gameplay and story were absolutely terrible, but the FMV sequences themselves were quite well done.
For applications and games, CD-ROMs would dominate the whole decade (and well into the mid 2000s really). But this kind of multimedia CD-ROM, which had content for the sake of content, definitely peaked earlier.
In 1994, home computers were getting more much popular, thanks in large part to the Eternal September having already begun and the proliferation of other national dialup services. People were finding interesting things with these new-to-them (expensive!) computers offline because even though dial-up was a prime reason they bought a computer to begin with, it very slow and was often still metered.
And by 1994, approximately every new big-box desktop computer came equipped with a CD-ROM drive. IDE CD-ROMs became well-entrenched around that time (which reduced costs by eliminating competing proprietary buses), and CD-ROMs held what was still a seemingly monumental amount of data. So they often used CD-ROMs to do much of their offline stuff.
Things like the Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX, and CD-i certainly helped move a non-trivial share of CD-ROM media, but the total number of these (pricey!) games sold is probably dwarfed by the ridiculous number of cheap shovelware PC releases. (And most people weren't reading like PSX discs in a PC -- piracy was a thing, but it required hardware hacking to work smoothly and successfully burning game discs was sometimes problematic enough that my friends considered it a black art.)
By 1996, things were changing in the PC space. Unlimited dialup was becoming common. Even AOL went from metered to flat-rate all you-can-eat in that year, and downloading larger things became a lot less of an ordeal.
The Way Things Work.
Encyclopedia of Space and Universe.
Encyclopedia of Nature.
And looking back at those on YouTube, they were pretty great! There is nothing like that in iPad era for kids. What comes close are those interactive iBooks that Apple tried to push when iBooks were new, but they never really caught on
I think the entire Eyewitness franchise, from the original books to the interactive games, can rightfully be considered a masterpiece both in multimedia and education.
Modern removable storage solutions just use the Universal Serial Bus, and could look like anything, and have no specified shape or size, and stick out of the machine.
CDs, floppies, and SDs slide nicely into a dedicated opening, and go all the way in. They’re nicely stackable and sortable. You can even write on them for quick labeling. Very user friendly.
https://www.old-games.com/download/3304/leonardo-da-vinci
were amazing, and a great way to encourage learning and exploration of knowledge for children.
I guess this sort of thing is done as apps now, but it doesn't quite seem the same --- not sure why.
Things did start looking up again near the end of the decade with Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Gothic, Thief and Deus Ex, only for the XBox to show up to ruin everything all again in 2001.
Then somebody figured out you can perform lossy compression with mp3 and fit hundreds of songs in a single CD, but the music industry that has been selling singles CD for more than USD10 per piece is not going to sell hundreds of song in one CD for peanuts. Then came Napster revolution that empowered the consumer with easily accessible songs for less than peanuts (read free) and then not long after came lawsuits from Metallica.
Steve Jobs by the virtue of being the boss of Disney, the darling of entertainment and music industry at the time, single handedly convinced the industry to sell a single song for 99 cents that can be downloaded from the Internet and saved the day for the music industry, then the rest is history and CD become history. After the demise of Steve, Apple become the first trillion dollars company and then the first three trillion dollars company in history.
(In the US, I assume a shipping cost of $4.13 Media Mail, with whatever eBay discount. And I can tape together a mailer of corrugated cardboard cut from an Amazon box. Plan to net $10+ after postage and eBay's cut, value your time at 0, and a box of old CD-ROMs adds up.)
Our most famous client was a little old book publisher named O'Reilly. I forget if either we helped work on their first site, or if we just made some multimedia CD-ROM adaptations of some of their books. We did some work related to Larry Wall's camel book.
Some time after that I turned 16 and a CD drive of my own was the only thing I desired for my birthday. Unfortunately my dad didn't get the hints and when a guy owed him some money he instead paid my dad by handing over an old Nissan Sentra Coupe, which my dad decided would be my birthday present.
I wasn't completely ungrateful, it was a great present. BUT where I live you can't get a license until you're 18 so I had to just stare at the car standing in the garage for two years.
If you looked at it wrong, or talked too loud, or seemed to be having a good day ... Poof.. buffer underflow, and a $5 coaster.
I grew to hate Adaptec, and had a really bad case of the SCSI Blues.
I'll never forget, nor forgive them.
At first I tried to make a study of it and ordered many, many kinds of blanks from different actual-manufacturers. Some were more expensive, some were fairly cheap.
I left them in hot places with bright light. I left them in cold places with no light. I handled them roughly. They all worked fine, except for the ones that were damaged from handling.
I wound up with a preference for Kodak-branded media, because it had what I perceived to be a more durable protective coating on top and top-layer scratches seemed to be the worst killers of CD-Rs in my samples.
Later, once inkjet-printable discs became more common, I used those instead -- regardless of brand. The relatively thick, white coating was easy to write on legibly with a Sharpie and seemed to do a good-enough job of protecting the lacquer below it from being scratched.
The bad experience was anyone stuck using IDE drives, which relied on the CPU to handle all the I/O. They were the ones getting buffer underruns.
' “Oh, they’ll [vcr's] be replaced by a disc player within four or five years,” Gates says. “I’m talking about access to media across the network.”
In other words, Gates is describing our ability to watch movies, TV shows and other streaming videos online. '
I'm not entirely sure he means the Internet by "the network"? In the same interview he refers to the Internet as "the Net".
He said DVDs would be replaced within 10 years by VOD TV. He also claimed that phones and Pocket PCs would have a big future.
I had so much fun with those discs, even fired up Basilisk II and tracked down the ISOs a few years ago to recapture some of that joy.
I loved that phase. I learned about HTML, read up on the trends, and a lot about computers from the CDs that came with the magazines. I had my first "IDE" from a CD—HotDog HTML Editor.
I was a true believer and it distracted me from what really mattered, that was happening at exactly the same time - the Internet.
Making it demountable is about glueing tabs to hold things solid surely?
For example: In life rafts they often have inflatable balloons, which have metallic foils inside in this 3D - configuration.
Next thing I know, MP3 players were invented and here we go again! I will say however, today I worry about how I'm gonna easily and cheaply recycle those discs.