Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I miss putting in a disk, hearing the drive spin up, my computer coming to life and working away.

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.

View on HN

I really don't miss the disastrous random access latency of optical media, nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever (or a friend doing the same to a game I'd lent them).

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 really don't miss the disastrous random access latency of optical media, nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever (or a friend doing the same to a game I'd lent them).

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.

Quite a few things fall out of favor and are on bad platforms, no platform at all, or bad quality.

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.

But I think of CDs as the start of this era of transience. Every single CD I burned was useless after a couple of years of sitting in a spindle. Most of my 3.5" floppies from the 90s still work fine, with maybe a few bad sectors. I don't know, maybe I bought cheap CDs to start with--I think the factory burned non-writable CDs lasted.

"Prerecorded" CDs are actually not "burned" by a laser (in the way that CD-Rs are) in the factory, but "stamped"/injection molded from a negative. It's a completely different process!

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.

Oh that's weird, I'm right now as I type this, listening to a CDDA disc I burned in 2009 and it's flawless. At least nothing's getting through the error correction; I suppose I could scan it and check the C1/C2 error rates, but I don't know what they were immediately post-burn to compare to. (I used to scribble the burn date on the front, so combined with the ATIP batch data, I could eventually build up empirical data about which ones failed prematurely. Never came up with enough failures to produce a signal from the noise, but I have all these discs with burn dates on them.)

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've read 20 years old CD-Rs without any apparent trouble. Simple trick: do not burn at the highest possible speed. Easily found information at the time.

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.

>Most of my 3.5" floppies from the 90s still work fine, with maybe a few bad sectors.

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?

My experience with 3.5” diskettes was too that they were unreliable- however the older 5.25” ones seemed a lot more durable. I suspect it has to do with the fact that by the end of their market-life 3.5” had to be made super cheap as nobody considered 1.44mb big enough in the late 90s and thus the quality of late-production floppies was low due to cost cutting.

3.5" floppies I think had a certain time-span (1980s - mid 1990s? maybe) when they were mostly good. Also double density disks always felt more reliable to me.

> disastrous random access latency of optical media

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.

> nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever

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.

This reminds me of things my dad says about his old Chrysler Valiant, “i love turning the car over, adjusting the choke, and hearing it catch on a cold winters morning”. To me it was just inconvenient, and to him too, but now he looks back at it as something to envy.

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.

Walking past computers in Starfield you hear them making hard drive noises and I realized I miss that.

It's great how quiet computers are now, but there was something to being able to hear the computer thinking too.

Watching them again recently, I was struck by how well the set and prop design of Alien and Aliens sold the idea of an industrial sci fi future.

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.

Space trucking, right? Not fancy but resilient and sufficiently functonal.

? That was just an unimaginative take on the current state of computers. Don't get me wrong, I love the vibe, they are some of my favorite movies, but it seems like lack of imagination rather than trying at all.

Here, put this on in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0

As a kid i was told, that a CPU works by many tiny switches being turned on and off blazingly fast.

So i interpreted the HDD seeking noise as the sound of those switches. :D

I remember I could recognize the sound floppy disk drives made when they encountered read error, so I knew before the error message appeared that I had to go copy the floppy again :)

Combine that with the speakers picking up a GSM call setup sequence before the phone actually rang, and you were pretty much clairvoyant.

I'm glad I grew up hearing floppy disks, hard drives seek, cd drives spin and most importantly, a modem establish a connection.

Silence is nice too though.

That modem sequence is probably one of the most memorable pieces of a whole generation's childhood. If you ask me now, when it's been over two decades since I've heard it, I would easily be able to badly reproduce the whole 30 second soundbite with my voice from memory. With confidence I could probably nail every single beep and boop including the pauses between them and the odd static sound near the end of the whole process.

I used to invite mates over and move my hand like a wizard to change the frequency of the tones, not letting on that I'd memorised the whole sound sequence by rote and was messing with them.

Honestly, all the silence has made me more wary of computer temperatures.

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.

This was also extremely satisfying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCe6xnxdN1Y

https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/soundofmodems/index.htm

https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-colle...

Oh. So that's what those noises were. I actually learned a thing today.

I might interest you in the museum of endangered sounds… http://savethesounds.info/

That channel also has one on if they fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnvBxYKDlc

Ah, the noise that preceded a great number of Starcraft matches.

I’m going to wall the ramp with a depot and a barracks then drop tanks on their ledge, you take your natural and pump hydras. These guys don’t know what’s up.

In the 90s I ran a dial-up BBS, and at some point, I had acquired a 4-CD changer. It was equally satisfying to hear it randomly come to life changing disks as someone had logged on to download something.

Did you have a pretty static download section? Or were you constantly burning new CDs? I vaguely remember Sysops mentioning CD changers in their advertisements.

What do you mean? Do you have any idea how long it would take people to download even a fraction of a single CD’s 650MB at 9600 bps at best?

My bbs probably switched CDs every 6 months.

Fairly static, but I'd cycle the CDs every few 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).

Same. There's a human need for sensations / stimulations / details that made the pre-digital era very satisfying and touching. Last time I booted a pentium box, to fix an old tape drive I was staggered by how lovely that old device felt. The led, the smooth motor hiss, the read patterns. Felt so cool even in the era of nvme ssd.

Compact Discs are digital.

the electromechanical device reading them is not

It's not like network cables (physical objects) and radio waves (physical phenomena) are digital either.

we were discussing the supporting devices of that era, not the underlying principles

I remember as a kid loading up the Encarta95 CD on the family 486, and the anticipation of what I could discover in the seemingly endless world of information that little spinning silver disc held within.

There is no contemporaneous equivalent.

Encarta paid for licensed content too, so it had nice audio clips of, say, Malcolm X speaking. Wikipedia is of course much more expansive in content, but since it all has to be Free, in some ways it doesn’t match what Encarta had.

I remember playing that game that was within Encarta where you would move between different rooms.

Make all your website spinners CD ROMs and play an audio of the spinning up sound.

It's not the full effect. I remember feeling the torque impulse through the desk.

We could make little USB gyros that simulate that.

Oh yeah, holding a spinning Discman you could notice the gyroscopic force; don't pivot it too fast or it'll precess beyond the suspension's compliance and scrape the edge of the disc!

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.

> Now I open a program, it reaches out to the internet, maybe I get some crappy spinner that is intermittently doing a thing

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.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

> I miss putting in a disk, hearing the drive spin up, my computer coming to life and working away.

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.

And then when you get a small scratch and you hear the drive constantly trying to seek until it gives up… absolute bliss.

I use optical discs sometimes, including for backups (I think the use of WORM media for making backup copies is beneficial).

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 miss actually owning software that couldn't be rewritten or revoked at any given time.

Physical media reminds us of an earlier era of computing and it was exciting

Unless you had one of those Matsushita drives that came bundled with the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0. they definitely didn't last...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com