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.
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.
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.
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.
? 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
As corny as they seem now the early FMV CD-ROM games felt like a gigantic leap forward at the time. Being able to interact with a photorealistic environment was a completely new experience. Being too ignorant at the time to understood how they worked it seemed like pure magic. Of course they were nothing but a novelty in retrospect but the illusion was very real at the time.
How about Weezer's "Buddy Holly" music video on the Windows 95 CD? Sometimes when I see articles about viral videos and views I wonder where that video would rank if we had the capability to track its plays.
Recently I had a flashback to a similar video on one of the MSDN CDs called "Studs from Microsoft". Studs, for those who weren't in the USA at the time, was a sort of dating game show in which two improbably attractive men each dated the same three improbably attractive women. The men are then quizzed on what the women thought of their dates and of the men, with the potential grand prize being a dream date with your preferred girl of the three. But that wasn't the point, the real entertainment value was all the ribald sexual talk in the questions and answers.
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.
The entire album "Songs of Innocence" was forced onto everyone's iPhone, whether they wanted it or not. Apple thought they were doing everyone a favor. When some people deleted it from their iPhones, it came back on its own.
"You're going to listen to this U2 album, and you're going to like it!" -- Tim Apple
Ha, I was going to say that. I think it was like 1992 and we got a packard bell for Christmas and it came with a stack of shareware CDs. 2mhz and 2MB of ram I believe. There was some kind of Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM point 'n click type game that had a bunch of FMVs. The whole family would gather around (sometimes the neighbors included) and we'd all oodle over the "graphics".
I'm assuming it's Sherlock Holmes and the case of the rose tattoo! What a brilliant game.
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.
When I was a kid, I remember being super fascinated by the Power Rangers game on Sega CD and played what little of it I could on the demo consoles at Blockbuster and other places.
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.
I scored a cheap 7-disc changer at university surplus, specifically for that game. It was only a 2x drive behind the changer, and I needed to source a SCSI controller card and cable, but I got it all going and suddenly I had LUNs galore!
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'm going to guess the poster was banned for something a while back. When you're banned on HN, you aren't locked out of posting, but everything you post appears as dead by default and requires someone to vouch it.
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.
In the late 90s and early 2000s my company shipped out a Linux distribution on CD monthly, called KRUD. Every month we'd take the latest versions of packages for RedHat, plus some notable additions, and build updated media you could use to update or install Red Hat with. It was really nice to be able to install a new system, which we did a lot of, and have basically the latest packages, with Internet-based "yum update"s being fairly minimal after install.
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.
Oh yeah, and there were all sorts of softwares to make the best of partial reads. I had one that I can't find the name of right now, that would compute forward-error-correction and make an additional file that you could store on the same disc, or on the last disc of a set. If you had 500MB of data, you could compute 150MB of FEC and fill the 650MB disc, and recover from up to 149.9MB of bad sectors later. (And that was the failures that got through the C1 and C2 error correction built into the drive, of course.)
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.
When I was buying them, in about 1995 (?), they ran about $20 a piece, IIRC. Every time there was a buffer under-run writing to one of them a little bit of me died inside.
Strange to see it as sort of a competitor to the Internet. They coexisted fine for a while until broadband became common, but that wasn't until well into the 2000s. Many games and apps were distributed on CDs but connected to online services or multiplayer peers over the internet.
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.
Not just that, but it's just plain cheaper and more efficient with commonplace broadband. You don't have to pay for making CDs/DVDs (paying for a master is quite expensive, and the rewriteable ones have poor shelf life and can't be mass-produced nearly as quickly), you don't have to pay for postage, and you're not stuck with whatever's on the master since you can just update your data in your datacenter at any time.
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.
IMO the concept of long-term bulk storage doesn't really make sense: Most of your stuff will be recycled by your grandkids.
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!"
And you need to keep the bits on current technology. That is the real gambit.
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.
I disagree a bit. Some things might require long-term data storage. For example, GPG keys, personal wallets, private documents and certificates.
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.
Have you considered 100GB BD-RE? These are rewritable, but that is only the byproduct of being a phase-change medium, which is also >50 years and thus has a longer shelf life than the standard WORM BD/DVD.
I am using them and can say only good things so far.
This is true, but depending on what the data is, hopefully that stuff could be donated to a library if the stuff lasted long enough to go into the public domain. Of course, if it's family videos, no one's going to care about that crap, but if it's pirated movies or whatever, some of that stuff might not be available otherwise. Just look at all the classic games from the 70s-80s that would be gone forever if people hadn't copied and distributed them.
Based on the whole recent VCF ordeal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005150 , donating any of this crap to a library or anyone else and it actually being used is a pipe dream. These organizations don’t have the time or space to process anything, assuming they don’t have it anyway.
Likely only the now deceased owner knew that they had xyz special material. Their kin processing their attic or garage likely don’t.
Why would people not care about family photos? All the stuff in the background is super useful for historians.
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.
>Why would people not care about family photos? All the stuff in the background is super useful for historians.
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.
Even just from one or a few decades ago is super useful.
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.
>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.
I found those things quite fascinating, and if it's as small as a few hard-drives (and not something as big as eg a car), I would definitely keep it around.
- Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
- 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
>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.
> - Most people are not as interesting as they think they are
> - 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.
It's very, very hard to preserve only exactly what you do, and nothing else. There's always context, and people might be interested in the context, even if they ain't interested in you.
Btw, there's lots of diaries and autobiographies published. Some of them quite popular.
They did. And if you have a newer drive it is already supported on your DVD or Blu-Ray. Can be read by all drives but requires a recent firmware to be able to write.
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.
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.
DVD-R’s are actually still super commonplace in the medical field. They’re the perfect way to provide patients their medical images in a cheap physical format that is readable by all electronic medical systems.
They are not the perfect way to get medical images. A friend called me last week to borrow my external drive because the MRI place gave him a stupid CD he had no drive for.
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.
Cheap "Chinesium" USB drives can be wildly unreliable, plus they're not write protectable meaning your data could be overwritten or deleted by a shitty app/antivirus, or just get malware transmitted over it.
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.
cheap USB drives have bad data retention. they will not be readable 3 years later if left unpowered and without a chance to relocate/rewrite data. DVD-Rs will last 20ish years
Kaiser emails you the DICOM medical images along with an app for reading them. Most hospitals offer this so I'd expect medical DVDs to die in another decade. The vast majority of PCs and laptops don't come with optical drives and that's been the case for many years now.
>Kaiser emails you the DICOM medical images along with an app for reading them. Most hospitals offer this
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
Unfortunately, drives are not so common these days. I had to go buy an external USB DVD drive to see the images given to me after a scan, just last year.
How about, hear me out for a sec, you email/file-share the data off the disc to the doctor abroad in those cases when you need to. Mind-blowing, right?
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.
I'd say never because no sane medical professional will be operating or doing any procedure on "some CD from somewhere", pretty much the same with mailing that out.
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.
Idk; we don't live in the cdrom world any more, it was replaced by high speed internet. The rest of this comment thread seems to answer as if we are asking this question today; and not in 1994 when 56k modems were still a thing and cds were routinely mailed.
I brought my CT scans on disc to my ortho who didn't have a CT machine in the last 300 days.
I have a hard time believing that it’s possible to set up a legal and technical framework where patient data can be safely accessed internationally faster than doing another X-ray or whatever might be currently distributed by CD.
Are you serious? You can call pretty much any hospital in the US and request DICOM files sent to your email. Mailing a CD across the world is insane, as is wasting money and radiation budget on yet another CT scan
No serious operation or procedure will be done by any doctor having some mailed x-ray photos.
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”.
Is this a regional difference? In the US, my experience has been like the other poster, it's normal for them to wait days or weeks for xrays from radiology specialty places. Maybe it's a rural thing where many providers don't have their own radiologist and end up outsourcing it.
I think the distinction is, the Dr orders the x-rays from a place they have a relationship with and waiting for it, vs, you bringing x-rays from some unknown source.
Which country? I am absolutely sure that here in the Netherlands its never the case. Always by email or printed in rare cases. Less than 1% owns a optical disc nowadays.
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 imagine they meant drive (not just media). But agreed, do people with game consoles (that splurged for the drive), CD/MiniDisc/SACD/DVD/BluRay/HD DVD/Laser disc players, CD/DVD/BluRay burners, older cars, older PCs/laptops/Mac minis, boom boxes, CDJs.. or multiples thereof not bring the average up?
I have a PERL Cookbook with a mint CD sealed in the cover.
I don't know about a percentage of households I know, but I do know of several households with literally zero means to play back any physical media. No DVD or Blu-ray players, cars don't have CD players, no computers with optical drives, no game consoles, only maybe a Switch for a game console.
I imagine it's still far from most, but it's definitely starting to be a thing.
Oh, I certainly believe there are plenty of households that don't have any devices that play back optical media.
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 suspect the percentage of drive owners is a lot lower. But I don't think it would be as low as 1%?
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 hate this about that field. I had to scrounge up an external DVD drive from the garage, convert the images and load them onto a medical imaging app on my phone... so that I could show the doctor, who otherwise had to keep going back and forth to another room in the clinic to talk to the tech.
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 :(
I often request Canadian government records through freedom of information, and they keep sending 10mb PDFs on CD-Rs. They’ve improved a bit recently, but was annoying for a while.
Also learned that a PS4 (or was it a PS5?) cannot open PDFs :(
Archive tape existed well before and well after optical discs.
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.
Well, a ton of the sort of information on CD-ROMs also became readily (and often even legally) available online. The focus of this article seems to be the wonder of having access to all this rich multimedia in your home which wasn't really practical before broadband was common and web content filled out.
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.
> Many games and apps were distributed on CDs but connected to online services or multiplayer peers over 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…):
CD-ROMs weren't really a competitor to the Internet, they were in consumer hands before many people even got on the Internet. Home PCs shipped with copies of Encarta or Groliers before they came standard with modems. It was more the Internet started to compete with the breadth and size of the content people would find on their CDs.
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.
They were a bridge to the internet IMO - without them, I don’t think the web would have grown as explosively as it did - they encouraged adoption of PCs with multimedia features, and provided the spur for people to experiment with and get serious about digital content.
That and DRM was always defeated. Physical distribution was profitable. And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.
Physical distribution is actually less profitable. Obviously you're going to invest in the creation of your piece of software or media but now you have to pay someone to press a certain number of discs, find a distributor willing to sell them for you, and then pay someone to go out to stores to convince them to buy discs from the distributor and sell them to customers. Product doesn't sell too well? Well you're still on the hook for the pressing and paying all the people who got it into stores. Product sells too well? Now you've got to get more pressed ASAP before a competitor can drop their version. For better or for worse, there was no margin for major bugs or exploits. You couldn't easily issue a patch without wasting money on another pressing. Once the Internet got fast enough and storage space got large enough, it really didn't make sense to rely on physical copies as the sole distribution method. Games can now be sold cheaper. Developers can take home a bigger cut of the profits. CD-ROMs made perfect sense for the era. It followed the music distribution system which again made sense because how else would someone buy music? You could distribute 700MB per disc of content to someone that might not even have dialup.
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?
The Switch is a cartridge-based console, but it can't really benefit from massive assets since the hardware is so weak.
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.
> And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.
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?)
> And who loves waiting 30 minutes for Steam games to update on a slow connection? Imagine what we could pack on physical media now and mail to your door if that were still the model.
I mean, say what you will about Steam's server bandwidth, it's at least higher bandwidth than the postal service.
No, it's definitely not. The postal service can easily beat any internet service's bandwidth. It might take 5 days to reach you, but if someone sends you a large box full of 20TB hard drives packed with data, there's no way you could download that much data in 5 days over a normal internet connection.
It's always been true, depending on how you interpret it. At any given point of time over the lifetime of the internet, there was always more bandwidth in packing a car full of the prevailing storage technology than in using the network. Over time, tape/drive capacities have increased, just as network speeds have, but I don't think was ever a point where the network was faster.
Also, it's probably still true, using the latest LTO tapes.
Do any of these theoreticals account for filling the storage media with data at the source, or ingesting it at the destination?
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.
It's especially ludicrous if you contemplate the microSD card. You can theoretically put 10+ exabytes in a car now. Driving that even across the country is like 100 TBps.
But once it gets to your house, it's actually yours. And then you can play it going forward without a service tracking you. Digital ownership is a massive ongoing failure of a marshmallow test.
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.
I question some of the figures in this article. It’s hard to believe 1994 is “peak CD”. I’d have expected that to be 1998-9. The PS1 didn’t come out until 1995 and must have represented a huge boost to both CDs and drives sold.
The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.
It's not explicitly stated, but in this article "CD-ROM" means, "Multimedia CD-ROM" that you'd buy for the sake of the multimedia content on it.
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.
Peak of hype/excitement - many things have their technical peak (most units sold/most units in the field) after the real "popularity peak".
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.
I remember upgrading from a 4x to 24x, and being excited for the much faster data transfer rate. What I didn't anticipate was the fact that it sounded like a jet taking off when it spun that fast! I figured out how to ratchet it down to 4x and kept it there unless I knew I'd need a fast sustained rate for something like copying hundreds of megs. It wasn't worth the noise for smaller transfers.
I have to agree. My family didn't get its first CD player until 1996, and that was because it happened to come attached to a new Packard Bell computer with a Pentium 100.
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.
I think the USB "jump drive" was a stop gap between CD and internet. There were many times where we would download once, copy to jump drive, then walk it around as if it were a CD as the download was still really slow to do it on each machine
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.
Made a “lot” of money (for a teenager) installing cd rom drives into computers in the 90s. The article isn’t lying - everyone I knew was buying them circa 1994 with no idea how to install them. I remember the first high speed one I installed… vibrated the entire desk. Now I’m buying them for $12 shipped off eBay and using usb to power them. Only purpose is burnt games for old consoles.
I used to manage a CD-rom shop in the mid 90s. We sold new titles and bought back software from customers to sell again as second hand. It was quite popular at the time. Not to mention I had access to a 486dx computer, later with voodoo, so that when the first tomb raider came out I was in heaven. What I miss most is that moment of anticipation between putting in the disk and starting that install dance, awe config, RAM setup etc...
I still have amazing memories of playing with Dorling Kindersley CD ROMs as a kid
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
And my personal favourite, Eyewitness Earth Quest! I extracted the pictures of stones from the CD-ROM and used them as desktop backgrounds for a while. I found Castle Explorer, another Dorling Kindersly release, also very educational, albeit nigh impossible as a game! (Thus it also taught me not to consider spying as a profession, be that in Norman times or the present day...)
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.
The thing that I miss mainly about CDs and floppies and even SD cards to an extent is that they were actually integrated into the machine itself.
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.
Back in the late-90s, I did datacenter support for a large company. I used to get calls all the time, asking for some sort of hardware support. However, it was almost always impossible to find the caller's server because most people never knew the location, and nothing was ever labeled correctly, anyway. So, I used to tell callers, "Eject the CD-ROM." ... It worked every time. LOL
I remember how CD-ROM killed the golden age of the PC computer role-playing game. When people had to make do with text, limited graphics and procedural content generation, we got things like Serpent Isle, Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor and X-Com near the end of the era. Then suddenly you had CD-ROMs to fill with static media files, everything had to look like a movie and now you only had capacity for pretty much one happy path with some half-assed roadblocks put in the way. The mid-nineties ended up being a dark age where people pretty much stopped making games with complex open worlds and many viable ways to interact with things.
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.
CD-ROM or just CD, a storage format made popular by the music industry so that they can sell many singles at ludicrously expensive price of more than USD10 per song per CD. These singles are the special CD with the latest or popular songs that you cannot buy using normal CD that contained many songs by the same artist. One CD had the size of 650 MB meaning that for lossless audio song, the maximum number of songs is less than 20. Unless you are Michael Jackson or selling your best songs compilation, most of other songs in the CD are lousy except the one song that toping the charts provided that if you had any. In other words, many song in the CD are just unwanted fillers.
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.
While spring-cleaning tech cruft recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many CD-ROMs now have eBay value, even ones that you'd think no one would ever want anymore.
(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.)
I worked at one of the first wave of web dev shops. And we also made CD-ROMs for our business clients. Line blurred. Because the kinds of CD-ROMs we produced typically had a direcrory of web-linked content on them. Like a website burned into plastic. An index page and lots of HTML and client-side JS, with embedded graphical image files. A good fit for catalogs, info archiving, educational resources or entertainment. Of course we also made live, Internet-exposed websites and web apps too. Server-side logic usually in Perl or C. Fuzzy memories of ColdFusion, and Macromedia Flash. The only web server we liked to use was Apache.
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.
I have a much older brother who was also into computers in the 80's and he bought himself all the newest toys of the time such as a VGA screen, a sound card and eventually a CD-ROM drive.
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.
Back in the olden days, we had a customer who wanted, and got budget for, a CD-ROM burner, with the requisite Adaptec SCSI adapter, cables, burning software, etc. Blank CDs were $5 each, and you only got one chance to write them. It got to the point that you didn't even touch the computer while it was burning a CD.
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.
Man, I used every kind of blank media on a Plextor PR-820.
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.
Even with Pentium + Adaptec 2940UW + UW SCSI disks + Plextor SCSI + tons of RAM, just opening notepad.exe resulted in a buffer underflow... I practically held my breath while the damn thing was burning a CD !
Related: A few years later, Bill Gates would make the rather absurd prediction that there would be no successor to the DVD, because in the future, people would simply stream their movies over the Internet!
When I was a kid in the '90s, I looked forward to every issue of CD-ROM Today because it always came with a disc that was loaded with games, software demos, icon packs, and more.
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’m somewhat surprised that the article doesn’t mention Robert Winter’s “The Interactive Beethoven”. I kept an old ThinkPad running for a long time after it should have been obsoleted, just so that I could spin up that disc. Amazing sound quality, great use of hypermedia… a real CD-ROM showpiece.
Oh, Come on. My girlfriend gifted me a CD-Case (1995-1996) because I was one of the few weird guys who did the CDs and stuff while that lousy-sleepy town barely got the right cassettes on time.
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’m also the friend who brings up Cinemania once a month for no reason. Not literally the same one but I used to love it. Now, I just sit peering between ads at 2-3 lines of Fast Company articles while trying to work out how to close the autoplay video ad…
Encarta provided the same function a complete set of Britannica 1918 edition, for his young mind. And it worked when the modem was busy downloading a new BSD release for me.
I need to combine CDROMs so that they form a radar reflector. With lots of 90 degree corners. Preferably a folding radar reflector. Some attending Origami Master might have solutions that are less obvious and simpler than just cutting them into 90 degrees slices?
Achually I am an expert. When I was kayaking in Chile all those small boats had such reflectors made of tin cans. The construction was so particular and uniform that it must have been goverment mandated.
This works with two, but you need third to make 3D-reflector. There is no elegant solution except cutting 90 degrees slices. And it does not fold easily.
Being an old timer, I remember a teenager showing me, for the first time, how easy it was to skip to any song I wanted without having to hunt for it, like on a cassette deck. It was mind blowing! Then, purchasing a CD-RW for my desktop machine, it was a game changer. Ripping my own music CDs in MP3 was crazy fun. I could now carry about ten albums on one CD-R disc!
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.
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.
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