this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
https://www.newegg.com/p/105-00B4-00001?item=9SIAKF3DSX2734&cm_sp=SP-_-1860010-_-0-_-2-_-9SIAKF3DSX2734-_-Cd+drive-_-cd%7Cdrive-_-8
50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-52x-700mb-cd-r/p/N82E16817507007
If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW's which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.
The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:
$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Latitude-E5420-Laptop-Intel-i3-WiFi-DVD-CDRW-250GB-Win-10-Professional-HDMI/376791632?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=100001344&gclsrc=aw.ds&&adid=22222222228376791632_100001344_153828919326_20723081503&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=679332641651&wl4=pla-2235097983966&wl5=9013636&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=129884431&wl11=online&wl12=376791632_100001344&veh=sem&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_ZhAcoOfd9b3WACPKd_QXPuq3NIZoFnxorRXOK1Xx-CwQz7SO1jSAaAlfhEALw_wcB
You could also write to a CD-R more than once, but you couldn’t truly delete anything (it’d just write to a separate sector on the disc), which would be really frustrating as soon as you could no longer fit your school project on the disc (though, not that it mattered because compatibility of optical media always seemed atrocious anyway… Probably a mix of different versions of PowerPoint or whatever and actual CD compatibility issues).
I agree, but when you introduce someone to math, you don't start with integrals, haha. Thank you though for following up with good info, I almost added some about it, and thought it may make it over the top for an intro
I figured you knew, I just wanted to complain a little haha.
Yeah there was a point after which it became cheaper for the manufacturers to just make read/write drives than produce both.
Fun fact, for a while they would disable the "write" portion. They would sell the same exact drive one for like 99$ that could only read and one for like 199$ that write. Once the techies found out and it started becoming common knowledge they gave up even selling read only drives.
That's not really a junk computer. That's actually a respectable machine, especially if you use a linux distro.
I suppose not everyone had the hardware to cut their own vinyl, so being able to stick the disky thingy in the bleep bloop machine and make your own diskies at home sounded kind of bizarre at first
We had recordable tapes for quite a while beforehand though
We even called our MP3 CD compilations "mix tapes"
As a teenager musician in the 90s, I salivated over the hulking $1k device that could write CDs that lived at the back of the Guitar Center catalog.
Also, the $2.5k Akai MPC for sampling/sequencing.
Now I can do all of this with my phone, but I'm too busy taking a shit before I go to work to stock shelves.
Yeah my mind went right to this. My dad had a few 45s but that had meant paying for a rehearsal space with recording. That was probably the last major medium the average user couldn't make their own
It started with a Tori Amos lyric about someone burning CDs. I couldn’t imagine why you’d destroy valuable property lol. The term was used originally in industry and later adopted for home use.
The first commercially available CD-Rs were produced in 1988.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R
Tori Amos became popular in the 90s. The term burning a CD was in common parlance by 1993. I doubt that Tori is the origin of the phrase.
In 1993, computers were just starting to get CD-ROM drives and CD-Rs were pretty exotic technology. Being able to burn CD's really didn't really go mainstream until the very late 90's.
The Sega MegaCD didn't have any copy protection because people couldn't burn their own CDs yet.