[HN Gopher] The short, happy reign of CD-ROM
___________________________________________________________________
The short, happy reign of CD-ROM
Author : ecliptik
Score : 97 points
Date : 2024-06-18 13:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| pcwalton wrote:
| > 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.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Depends where you live ;)
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| What is a "marshmallow test"? I've never heard that
| phrase before?
| vel0city wrote:
| A psychological study of children if they would take a
| small but immediate payout versus a larger but delayed
| payout.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_expe
| rim...
| eru wrote:
| Honestly, I would take the single marshmallow:
|
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Somewhat dated by the reference to tapes but still true
| overall:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv
| 3/n...
| shiroiushi wrote:
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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 ?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I guess you never saw a proper tape library?
|
| * Start with an 80-slot 6U form-factor Base Library
| Module, and add up to 6 Expansion Library Modules for a
| total of 560 slots in a 42U rack form factor
|
| * 25.2PB of total maximum compressed capacity with 560
| slots and LTO-9 drives
|
| * Performance scaling from _1 to 42 LTO HH Tape Drives_
| and transfer rates of _300 MB /s per LTO-9 Tape Drive._
|
| https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04111416.html?jumpid=in_pd
| p-p...
| Arrath wrote:
| >I guess you never saw a proper tape library?
|
| Does the robot armature in the enclosure swapping tapes
| around in Schwarzenegger's _Eraser_ count?
|
| Thanks for the example, that is a lot of tape and a lot
| of throughput.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Heh, I don't even remember that film.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41z8_qPOrJE Mail slot ie
| loading/unloading thingy, so you don't need to open it
|
| https://youtu.be/sYgnCWOVysY?t=92 TS4500 itself
|
| https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JZALEYPD TS4500 data
| sheet for even more impressive numbers:
|
| - Number of drives ... Up to 128 per library
|
| - Capacity* with 3592 advanced cartridges ... Up to 877.5
| PB native
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9boQn3nHnCA "27PB in the
| rack"
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| wildzzz wrote:
| 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?
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Many console games are available on physical media. They
| still don't have gigantic differences in size from the
| digital only pc Steam games.
|
| That's probably because they're sold on Blu Ray discs though.
| If you had cartridge based consoles maybe you could have
| gigantic games nowadays.
|
| Actually...couldn't you have gigantic terabyte games anyway?
| I'm not aware of Steam or any of the consoles restricting
| game data size...
|
| Hmmm
| Arrath wrote:
| Give it a few more years and the annual Call of Duty title
| may well hit a tb. The latest one is up to something like
| 300gb iirc.
| kbolino wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > 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?)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| 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.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| Great feature of DVD-Rs is that someone across the globe
| cannot just connect to it and steal medical data.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| And the doctor across the globe can never access it to
| save the patients life.
| adrianN wrote:
| How often is that a problem?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| It could be a problem any time someone travels.
| adrianN wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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
| ozim wrote:
| 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".
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| junker37 wrote:
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| 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.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| This is nonsense, doctors routinely order scans from
| other doctors or hospitals who have equipment and then
| view the results.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| 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.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> 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
| internet101010 wrote:
| 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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 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
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| 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.
| holoduke wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > Less than 1% owns a optical disc nowadays.
|
| Sources? That seems way too low.
|
| I would expect most people have at least one CD hidden
| somewhere in an attic or similar.
|
| I don't have an optical drive connected to any working PC
| (nor a music CD player) myself, but I still have some CDs
| lying around the house. Eg a book about learning guitar
| that I bought second-hand came with a CD.
| gnabgib wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| 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 :(
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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
| :(
| NavinF wrote:
| 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!"
| lencastre wrote:
| Tell me more about raidz and resiver...
| NavinF wrote:
| Hm?
|
| It automatically replaces the dead drive with a hot spare
| over a couple of days. You can also do it in a couple of
| hours with dRAID: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-
| docs/Basic%20Concepts/dRAI...
|
| You just need a couple of parity drives per vdev and one
| hot spare for the whole array
| eru wrote:
| > Most of your stuff will be recycled by your grandkids.
|
| Could you explain this? Why would they do that?
| NavinF wrote:
| - 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
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Once you're old you almost certainly won't be using
| modern software and file formats. Accessing your data
| will be incredibly inconvenient
|
| This isn't true. Sure, no one uses WMV or ZOO these days,
| but you can still get tools to read them. But those were
| also not-so-popular formats/codecs that were replaced
| quickly by better stuff. MP3 is also old, but still very
| ubiquitous. Furthermore, the specs and software for
| modern file formats (like audio/video codecs) are all
| publicly available. People will still be able to read
| h.264 videos 50 years from now, don't worry.
|
| It's not going to be like the Domesday Book.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, it's actually incredibly easy, if not always
| convenient, to read most of these old formats.
| eru wrote:
| > - 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.
| sdwr wrote:
| Or, written even less kind, the intersection of sets of:
|
| - people with interesting lives
|
| - people who meticulously archive and backup all their
| personal data
|
| is close to 0. You're either doing or you're preserving,
| so if you preserve what you do, you aren't doing anything
| worth preserving.
| jwagenet wrote:
| Most people have no use for the things their parents or
| grandparents found sentimental or worth keeping, so they
| toss it.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >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.
| eru wrote:
| I've lived in five countries on three continents. And am
| currently still living half a world away from where I
| grew up.
|
| It's fun, but it's not for everyone.
| jwagenet wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| clan wrote:
| 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.
| nextos wrote:
| 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.
| eru wrote:
| > I'm just sad that no one's come up with a really good,
| user-writeable long-term bulk storage solution.
|
| Tape would be pretty good, wouldn't it? Or magneto-optical
| media.
| clan wrote:
| 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.
|
| It is rated for 100+ years.
|
| The variant is called M-Disc:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
|
| Discs: https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/
| https://www.ridata.com/M-DISC/eng/index.asp
|
| Blu-ray license list: https://blu-raydisc.info/licensee-
| list/discmanuid-licenseeli...
|
| The hard part will actually be to get hardware in 100 years
| which can read this. So it will not be write and forget. But
| reasonable shelf life should at least be available.
| xnorswap wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > 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...):
|
| https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml
| jsz0 wrote:
| 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.
| Fomite wrote:
| This. I remember playing a Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM game with
| tiny little clips of FMV, and feeling like this was the future.
| esaym wrote:
| 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".
| pocketarc wrote:
| 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.
| agent86 wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean, more recently there was that whole fiasco where
| Apple downloaded a new U2 song onto everybody's iPhones and
| made its users very angry.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| Deadly Tide on Windows 95 was amazing. I still consider it to
| be one of the best rail-shooters ever made.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Why did this comment require vouching?
| duxup wrote:
| Something automatic due to post history maybe?
| duxup wrote:
| I used to buy so many of those cheap CD-ROM animation / video /
| pics collection disks.
|
| They were fun to run through.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I remember being awed at Under A Killing Moon on 4(!) CDs.
| Great game.
| will1am wrote:
| The ability to include real video footage in game
| timonoko wrote:
| 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?
| ggm wrote:
| don't cut them up. Make one radial slit on each of two, and ..
| slot them together.
| timonoko wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| slot 2 the way I described and then you only have to cut
| quarters for the 3rd disc.
|
| Making it demountable is about glueing tabs to hold things
| solid surely?
| timonoko wrote:
| The aim is to make it totally foldable and flat.
|
| For example: In life rafts they often have inflatable
| balloons, which have metallic foils inside in this 3D -
| configuration.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Don't design your own radar reflector unless you can test it-
| it might not work.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I feel resentful about CD-ROM.
|
| I was a true believer and it distracted me from what really
| mattered, that was happening at exactly the same time - the
| Internet.
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
|
| I'll never forget, nor forgive them.
| esafak wrote:
| But were you using Taiyo-Yudens on a Plextor FTW??
| liotier wrote:
| 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 !
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
| rconti wrote:
| This was a good experience. SCSI adapters (with their onboard
| I/O) and burners were for the rich.
|
| The bad experience was anyone stuck using IDE drives, which
| relied on the CPU to handle all the I/O. They were the ones
| getting buffer underruns.
| trustno2 wrote:
| 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
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| 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.
| rideontime wrote:
| Like many other commenters here, I, too, used CD-ROMs in the 90s.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Make all your website spinners CD ROMs and play an audio of the
| spinning up sound.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| 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
| :)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Here, put this on in the background:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0YYF56FT0
| andruby wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| 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
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| thih9 wrote:
| > 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
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| And then when you get a small scratch and you hear the drive
| constantly trying to seek until it gives up... absolute bliss.
| gregmac wrote:
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| This was also extremely satisfying:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCe6xnxdN1Y
| Arrath wrote:
| Ah, the noise that preceded a great number of Starcraft
| matches.
| Loughla wrote:
| Oh. So that's what those noises were. I actually learned a
| thing today.
| neom wrote:
| That channel also has one on if they fail:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urnvBxYKDlc
| lxgr wrote:
| 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.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| > 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| will1am wrote:
| Physical media reminds us of an earlier era of computing and it
| was exciting
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
| tiltowait wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 1994 was when the CD felt peak, even though it grew in
| popularity later.
|
| 1994 was still solidly in the floppy era, and getting a CD-ROM
| was huge, even larger than some hard drives at the time.
|
| If you had a CD-ROM drive in 1994, you were king.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| Quad Speed! ;)
| bombcar wrote:
| It was later but we got a Kenwood True-X 72x and that thing
| was a beast!
| will1am wrote:
| Paarticularly in the context of both gaming and music
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
| xnorswap wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Eh. 1994 feels about right.
|
| 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.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I really miss the innovation/energy of this time frame --- things
| such as Microsoft's Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM:
|
| https://www.old-games.com/download/3304/leonardo-da-vinci
|
| were amazing, and a great way to encourage learning and
| exploration of knowledge for children.
|
| I guess this sort of thing is done as apps now, but it doesn't
| quite seem the same --- not sure why.
| biofox wrote:
| As a kid in the 90s, Encarta was pure magic to me.
| moth-fuzz wrote:
| 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.
| draazon wrote:
| 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.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| 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.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 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
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