https://www.fastcompany.com/91128052/history-of-cd-roms-encarta-myst
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.
Note, the following bookmarklet will remove the thin lightweight font style from the page, making the overall text much easier to read:
javascript:(function(){var all=document.getElementsByTagName("*");for (var i=0,max=all.length;i<max;i++){all[i].style.fontWeight='400';};void(0);})();
(Score: 4, Informative) by DrkShadow on Thursday June 20 2024, @03:56AM (5 children)
Now we can have a little tiny USB fobby-thing that can hold 128 CDs at a time. A foot-tall spindle of them! How convenient.
That's 64GB, and you can easily go up to 256GB, and down in size to a MicroSD card with a _tiny_ reader (that hardly stucks out of the USB port), and these devices can read 1/10th-1/5th of a CD per second, -- the progress..
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday June 20 2024, @07:45AM (3 children)
I just picked up a couple half-terabyte thumb drives last week for $38 each.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday June 20 2024, @09:58AM (2 children)
It is amazing. For example I modified my old ipod to hold 1TB of music, which is more than 30 times what the original hard disk could fit.
It uses 4x256GB microSD cards, each 256GB card holds over 400CD's worth of data and are the size of a fingernail. Likewise I remember when CD's came out, they said a CD could hold more than 400 floppies worth of data. The growth in storage has been phenomenal.
It does feel like we have plateaued a bit with storage growth though, we don't see a 400x increase in storage every 10 years, however we really have progressed a lot in a fast time when I look back.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 20 2024, @04:34PM (1 child)
It does feel like we have plateaued a bit with storage growth though, we don't see a 400x increase in storage every 10 years
Unless you were CERN, why would you need it? Yes, I remember marveling at a 10 megabyte hard drive, but I have a 4tb file server that only cost $200 several years ago. Most of my records, tapes, and movies are on it, and there's plenty of room. I think 6 or 8 tb costs that little now.
It's not like we need pkzip any more, except for email.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday June 20 2024, @05:46PM
As density increases, you can get more space in the same physical size, or you can get the same space in a much smaller package.
I don't necessarily need more space, however I would not mind the space I need getting physically cheaper, smaller and with lower electricity consumption.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday June 20 2024, @04:29PM
I have two half terabyte thumb drives for mp3 music for my car. One is a backup. Over 10,000 songs and it's mostly empty.
I had a tb thumb drive, but it didn't last long.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2, Disagree) by bart9h on Thursday June 20 2024, @04:28AM (3 children)
The CD is of the worst media of all time. Even floppy disks ran circles around CDs in terms of usability.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday June 20 2024, @05:54AM (2 children)
Floppy disc: Insert into slot. Use
Early CD-ROM. Take out of individual jewel case. Ensure disc is clean and free of smudges/marks. Open CD Caddy and insert CD-ROM into caddy. Close up caddy. Place caddy into CD-ROM slot, ensuring that it faces the right way up (I think some caddies could accidentally be put in upside-down?). Make sure you have the right drivers installed for your PC to be able to read from the drive (one-off, but still a step).
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday June 20 2024, @09:53AM (1 child)
I do feel they missed a trick with not putting CD's in hard casings, like they did with mini-disc (another missed trick with not letting those be data flexible like CD's were). Originally I think CDs were supposed to come in a hard case with a slot (like a large floppy disk), but I guess they decided to reduce costs.
As a result CD's were very fragile and prone to scratching, and floppies held on for years afterwards as a more rugged option.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday June 20 2024, @10:42AM
The first few CD-ROM units I saw were all caddy systems where you in essence put the disc in a hard plastic shell, almost like as if it was a very large floppy -- in basically every sense. But it went away fairly soon for the tray mechanic where you just put in the recessed area and then not even that as it was just slot-in.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bart9h on Thursday June 20 2024, @04:31AM (3 children)
Instead of using that bookmarklet you could just use the browser's "reader view" mode (Ctrl+Alt+R in Firefox).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Thursday June 20 2024, @06:33AM
Good point.
You can also 'Select All' 'Copy' and the 'Paste' into an editor of your choice where you can make readability adjustments.
Unfortunately, 'curl'ing the url and piping into 'less' doesn't work, because it wants javascript enabled and adblockers disabled.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 20 2024, @11:24AM (1 child)
Alternatively, just block all remote fonts. I read the page using system fonts. None of my browsers ever download fonts that the server commands it to use. These days, blocking remote fonts is a service provided by Ublock Origin.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday June 20 2024, @12:24PM
I thought that was a feature in most browser these days and you didn't even need a plugin for it. Even if I use Ublock I set the browser font in the browsers preference instead (preferences - content - advanced in palemoon). While I have not quantified it so I can't be certain it feels like the pages become snappier. I guess they do since it's less crap to process and possibly also load.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Thursday June 20 2024, @04:54AM (2 children)
CDs were *massive* compared to floppy disks. They promised endless information. But it turned out, people don't really want 650 thousand pages of text. They want video a.k.a. "multimedia". CDs weren't really fast enough, the storage space wasn't big enough, and computers at the time weren't quite ready for it.
By the time DVD drives were common, things had caught up. You could browse years of magazines as full-color PDFs. Clip art collections were large enough to have a few good graphics, even if it was by accident. There was enough space, and enough quality, for video to be useful. Watching movies on your computer became a thing.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday June 20 2024, @09:50AM
In what way were CD's not fast enough for multi-media? The main reason CD's got popular was that you could finally store (and stream) both audio and video on them. They were the consumer "multimedia revolution" as it was called back then.
You could fit an entire encyclopedia on a single disk, with video and audio clips as well as text (as made famous by Encarta [wikipedia.org] and Comptons [wikipedia.org] CD Encyclopedias). There were loads of clipart/photo CD's available to purchase as well.
Video CD's were a thing, released in 1993 (so a bit before DVD existed), and later came the (legal gray area) DivX/XviD CD's which gave higher quality. Both of which could store a feature length film on them.
MP3 itself was developed in 1991, and in 1994 it was made public, shortly afterwards people put them on CD's. MP3 CDs brought days of music playback on a single disk as well and revolutionised portable music (as well as piracy).
Intel even introduced MMX extensions to aid with multimedia decoding on computers, due to the popularity and excitement over the new medium.
And CD's did not only do revolutionise multi-media. Before CD's you could only fit text documents (or one very low quality) photo on a floppy disk. To move any kind of data took a stack of them, and you sitting there inserting one disk after another manually when prompted.
Installing large applications was a major PITA, we were so happy when applications and operating systems started showing up on CD-ROMs (originally CD-ROMs were not bootable, so you would get a "boot floppy" with CD-ROM and other drivers on it to allow the install from CD).
When I think back, the introduction of the CD-ROM (and especially the CD-writer for end-user data sharing) was really a pivot of transformation to our modern world. DVD's in a way were just a logical refinement of the multi-media CD, allowing more space, but were not transformative in any major way that I can think of.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday June 20 2024, @08:45PM
My first job out of college involved programming and creating installation masters for sales configuration software for various customers. One of our customers was General Motors. We were originally limited to floppies, but when CDs came out we used those too.
The CDs were easy; burn the master and send them to our in-house duplication department for mailing out. Floppies had to be created, then a duplicate sent over mass duplication and mailing.
One major release we had greatly increased the size of the installers, mainly due to better graphics. Since there were a few dealers who still did not have a CD drive we made a set of floppies. The full install was 110 floppies. Getting a full set without any bad floppies was a massive PITA.
I'm not sure who made the decision to no longer support the program on floppies, but both my company and GM agreed to no longer do them. Thanks FSM!
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snospar on Thursday June 20 2024, @08:11AM (1 child)
I still remember we had a server with a temperamental CD drive that loaded disks directly into a slot, without a tray. Occasionally something would go very wrong and the disk would start to spin faster and faster with a very audible whine. The old hands knew to find and kill the task that was accessing the drive and it would normally slow back down. Unfortunately it was often a junior member of staff nearest the server and before you could say "Don't press the eject..." they had launched a spinning-disk-of-death across the room, at impressive speeds. Happy times indeed.
Don't forget the slip hazard of AOL CD's on the floor behind your letterbox!
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mcgrew on Thursday June 20 2024, @04:40PM
I grew gardens in the '90s. CDs made excellent scarecrows, and the ones from AOL were free.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday June 20 2024, @12:32PM
... CDs are the most reliable writable optical media invented so far (at least from the main-stream ones). The limited capacity also made for some implicit advantages. Back in the day I had written a backup-script that would append a new incremental backup track every night (do not "close" the disk, remember?). When the disc was full, it would open the tray, and I could insert a new disc, storing the old in a safe place.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 20 2024, @05:59PM (1 child)
Floppy disks were good in their day, but by the early 1990s, software and media had so greatly exceeded their capacity that we really needed something better than these crazy installs that required 30+ floppy disks. For a while, floppies advanced in capacity, going from roughly 100K to 1.44M. And there they stalled. By the time a 2.88M floppy drive and accompanying disks came on the market, it was too late.
Around this time, Iomega came out with their Zip drive that put 100M on each of their special floppy disks. There was also the SuperDisk. That could have competed with CDs. But the Zip system had some very bad issues, such as the "click of death" that would somehow damage and lose all the data on the disk. And signify that your drive had failed. This could even go viral, with an attempt to read a ruined disk on a good drive causing the good drive to go bad. Iomega, too predictably, played down the problems, claiming it was rare, was the fault of the users, etc. I tried Zip disks, and wish I hadn't. CDs had their rough edges too, such as the infamous buffer under-run problem. If your computer couldn't feed it data every time the drive needed it, and in those days when memory wasn't dirt cheap and drives therefore had small buffers and needed a near constant flow, your burn would result in another useless drink coaster.
While users welcomed the advent of the CD-ROM, publishers did not. They loved stamped CDs. From their 1983 introduction (actually late 1982) to the early 1990s when CD-ROMs took off, there was no practical way for an end user to duplicate a CD. Didn't even have data CDs at first, only audio. At a typical size of 40M, hard drives were way too small to hold all that 700M data. Hard drive capacity surged in the early 1990s, finally breaking the 100M barrier to rapidly shoot up to 500M. There was no practical compressed audio format until the introduction of MP3 in 1991. After the advent of mp3, the CD-ROM, and the Internet, publishers treated us to endless accusations of piracy. This whining still dogs us today.
One odd anecdote. I lost a DVD to a huge scratch from the DVD drive. The corners of the face of the drive tray had been left very pointy and sharp, and while loading a DVD, I brushed it against one. Lost a disk because the corner of the drive tray hadn't been smoothed down, and made a huge scratch in the disk, how crazy is that? I filed those sharp corners down, too late for that disk.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday June 20 2024, @09:58PM
You should try owning vinyl, it's all the same things. And both formats can be duplicated (re-recorded) on cassette.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday June 20 2024, @11:21PM
I still use CD/DVD-Rs for certain kind of archival, in conjunction with hard drive storage.
With CD/DVDs, when storing a large number of them, you don't have to worry about electronics on each one - that is all in the drive, and those can be replaced easily. CD/DVDs are also read-only (except for RWs), so one erroneous sector write can not bork an entire archive.
DVDs don't store a lot any more, and blue-ray data disks never seemed to catch on in desktop PCs. Laptoys don't even have built in disk players any more.
But back in the day I used to use a Backpack parallel port CD-ROM drive to load up standardized laptop images and other software. That worked more reliably and simply than any other parallel connected device at the time.
I also set up a large CD-ROM jukebox for an office, with the idea being it would serve up data for a massive multi-CD database that was supposedly in development. But after a few years, it suddenly became practical to stuff a bunch of consumer grade gigabyte sized hard drives in a few networked machines, making the entire jukebox obsolete. I don't believe that database ever actually materialized.