The Dawn of PC Multimedia: Laser Discs and CD-ROMs (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Dawn of PC Multimedia: Laser Discs and CD-ROMs (2013)

filfre.net

57 pointsgwern54 comments

Ah, this article brings back some nice memories of Christmas in 1993 and receiving Myst as a gift[1]. I was dismayed it required a CD-ROM drive, which we didn't have... except... hey what's this other gift? Our family's first CD-ROM drive! It was a momentous occasion! Nowadays CD drives are basically thrift shop throwaways, but back then they cost $hundreds and you were lucky to read at 4x speed. Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced and it was easy to find huge libraries of neat new stuff to check out. Far more convenient than trying to download stuff at 1-2kB/sec over dialup! :'D

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/

Yeah. When CDs first came out for the PC, you could suddenly have all this neat digital stuff at your fingertips that was effectively not practical to download at any decent rate. You could also start getting photos scanned for the first time.

> Fortunately, demo CDs suddenly became widely produced

So many AOL CDs in the mail...

I think my first drive was a 2x Plextor internal SCSI that used the caddies. Pros: Never a scratched disc. Cons: You had to acquire & deal with caddies.

Hey, before that was AOL floppies which were great -- free disks to use! Just put some scotch tape over the "write-protect" hole in the disk! hahaha :)

I recall running into a caddie drive once.

Effectively it was used like a tray drive, with a removable tray...

I remember the switch to CD was huge.

1995 I got Lands of Lore (the LoL of our time, hehe) from my uncle in a box of 5-10 floppy disks.

1997 I got one CD with about 20-30 games like WarCraft, Doom, Command&Conquer etc.

It was orders of maginitude bigger than what I was used to and only a few times smaller than my 2GB HDD at that time.

I only got that feeling again with my USB3 drive I bought 3 years ago that was 128GB big.

On the other hand it took a bunch of years till I could get my hands on a used CD burner, because they were so expensive and only a few kids at school could copies, most of them taking around $10 for a copy.

About CD burners, I remember sharing one with a friend from the same building I was living, by encasing it on an external SCSI box. 4x speed, no less! It took me a while to realize that walking around on my room whilst burning a CD produced corrupted copies.

I had one that required you to put the disc in a plastic caddy first. Only 1x speed though. Burning from Windows was too unreliable, some interrupt might fire and ruin the disc, you had to drop down to DOS and make sure there weren't any TSRs running, and heaven forbid someone touch your computer while the burn was running. Those CD blanks were expensive. I didn't make too many coasters at least, and they were usually my fault.

haha, yes!

I had a 4x speed used CD burner I got from a friend too.

It had a 80% success rate.

I used the CD ROM drive attached to a computer at my dad's school, around 1994. I think the computer's hard disk was about 200MB, I remember wondering how they put the data in one place to assemble the CD ROM.

(And yes, back then it was always "see dee rom ".)

> 1997 I got one CD with about 20-30 games like WarCraft, Doom, Command&Conquer etc.

Good old Walnut Creek CDROM.

I wonder if i still have the stack of cover CDs i accumulated during a lonely student year (resulted in a deep seated appreciation for the flexibility of Quake1's Quake-C).

I also recall that i developed a habit of making my own utility collection discs once i got a modem and a net connection, to avoid having to download all the various shareware and stuff i invariably found missing after a Windows install.

Same here, back in the days when stuff wasn't outdated every week :D

ftp.cdrom.com was such an amazing resource, especially /idgames/. Dialling up 56k and jumping to /incoming/ to see what had just arrived was really fun in it's heyday.

There's a kinda archive available on https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom

Haha, didn't know how it was called.

I got it two times from different friends on different CDs.

Often it was just called "The Game-CD from <FRIENDS_NAME>"

>Lands of Lore (the LoL of our time, hehe)

Thank you, I was looking for the name of that game for at least ten years.

The RPG of my time, haha.

You should look into Legend of Grimrock if you want something more up to date :)

Thank you, I didn't expect to find a modern game with that gameplay style.

Heh, i ruined someones money making scheme the day i got my first burner and offered copies at the cost of a blank CDR.

Somewhat sad that MO media didn't pick up any steam though, as i kinda miss the day when i could do random RWs on a completely passive media (meaning all the logic lived in a fully replaceable drive).

optical discs don't really do RW in the same way as a floppy, HDD or flash chips, but the latter two have a whole lot of embedded logic stuff that can go sour even if the actual storage media is just fine.

Yes, we got some kids later that did this too.

First there were a few that used their parents burner.

Later some got their own burners and did it for the cost of a blank CDR.

The prices of the CDRs dropped too, first I paid like $10 for one and later I got 50 for like $50.

Funny thing was, at the beginning the burning was unreliable and the CDRs expensive. Later when they got cheaper the burners also got more reliable.

There was a great ceremony when burning in the single-speed days where the hard drive could barely keep up. Vibration, buffer underruns, loud noise, they could all trash your burn. You'd set it, then watch, on the edge of your seat, hoping it'd succeed. Then you'd carefully hand this golden artifact to the next person.

Later you'd burn a single PSD on a CD-ROM because it's almost cheaper, faster, and more reliable than printing it out.

My first CD burner was around 1998. It used a parallel port and I used it with a laptop. Now that I think about it, I still had a PowerMac back then with SCSI. I don't know why I didn't get a SCSI based CD burner. Also, why didn't they have USB based burners back then?

In 1998, most machines barely had USB 1.0 support, much less USB 1.1 support. While USB 1.1 supported up to 15 Mbit/s "full speed", most systems at that time were still only average the 1.5 Mbit/s "low speed", which is just enough to burn a CD at 1X (and I certainly remember how slow 1X seemed; I was quite proud of the 16X burner I had at one point in HS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed

Back in the mid 90s USB was way too new and unreliable to be trusted to burning optical media. Burners were mostly PATA (ATAPI), or SCSI. There were also some hacks that ran over a Parallel Port, but those seemed like a bad idea to me. SCSI burners were the most reliable, but PC SCSI cards weren't so great. The only one that seemed worthwhile at the time was the Adaptec 2940. Sadly, the SCSI tax was in full force so you paid through the nose for somewhat reliable burns.

The USB situation was a bit better in the late 90s (98-99), but even then it was a nontrivial source of blue screens.

Funny thing about ATAPI is that it is basically SCSI wrapped by ATA (IDE).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface

BTW, anyone old enough to remember wrestling with IDE cables without notches? Meaning you had to figure out the orientation of them via the one marked wire at one edge of the ribbon?

lol, I even put my CPU in wrong once, because they where square

I gave up and spent some money on a pair of SCSI TEAC drives (reader and writer). My poor P2 could now burn audio cd on the fly.. no need for pre processing. So smooth.

I still have an Adaptec AHA-2940 that I use for running a Polaroid Sprintscan 45 Ultra film scanner because as far as I can tell it's the only SCSI cards with drivers that work on anything newer than Win XP.

Unfortunately, replacing that scanner with anything remotely equivalent that can do 4x5 would be at least several thousand dollars so... SCSI it is.

This is wrong :( Wiki had wrong info for a long time, more at http://www.os2museum.com/wp/how-fast-again/

USB 1.0 already had both 1.5 Mbit/s "Low Speed" and 12 Mbit/s "Full Speed" modes.

Time to come clean about my first CD burner story I guess. In 1998 they were pretty common already but I was a poor student in a foreign country so could not afford one. Office Depot (I think that's what it was called) had a good return policy, so the scheme was as follows : I would buy the CD burner and a friend would return it a few days later. Only the box would contain my old plain cd rom drive and not the burner. We relied on the incompetence of the Office Depot staff and hope they would not recognize the difference. Why was my friend to return it then ? Well simply because he could claim ignorance of the matter in case they discovered the swap, and I could later choose to return the real CD burner or keep it, depending on my finances. Well as it turned out the staff were really as useless as we had hoped and we burned many, many cds in the months thereafter. (Most of which came from HMV which also had a pretty good return policy until they caught on) So hmv and Office Depot there you have it : my sincere apology for my youth mistakes !

USB 2.0 came out in 2000, I don't know if USB 1.1 would be capable of driving a CD-R reliably?

Very unlikely. The minimum speed of the CD burner is roughly the maximum speed of the USB port.

Without breaking up a sweat. USB 1.0 is >1MB/s, CD x1 speed is 150KB/s.

When the burner mania reached my country, I made so many lists of games to be compiled on a cd (to give to my nerd guru of the day in hope he would satisfy my wish).

Surprised the article didn't mention Dragon's Lair[0] -- probably the most popular example of a "interactive" LD app. Probably the first game with full-motion video as well (albeit analog).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_(1983_video_ga...

After the novelty, it wasn't that great a game.

It's basically the prototype for the Quick Time Event you see in most AAA games these days. AKA "press X to not die".

Because he brings that game up at length in the very next article.

Myst was huge and I was working 90 hours a week doing a cross platform CD ROM in 1995/96, using action script/ macromedia director, debabilizer for 256k color palettes and quicktime ui interction video snippets. It was a black art getting the disk to play on mac and pc - I had an in office ethernet network with mac and pc connected together. The product/project was obsolete a few years later. The big lesson for me was not to go down the cutting edge rat hole, problem solving and details ensnare you and you lose track of time and the market...

Ugh, that reminds me of some cover CDs that used some fancy/horrible macromedia based menu if you didn't kill the autoplay "feature" with fire.

I found a “blender” magazine on cd rom and decided to see if it was still usable recently.

While the menus don’t work on my intel Mac, the video files are readable but so small and very pixelated. It really was pretty full, but the web has really replaced this kind of thing. The disk was surprisingly full though at 600 mb of content.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(magazine)

Probably because early video codecs are terrible. Nowadays with modern codecs we can encode "higher-resolution" (like 320p or 480p) videos that are smaller in file size than the old postage stamp sized videos.

Yep, when divx hit the net and could compress (mangle?) a full length movie to fit on a single CD was a big deal.

Before then there was VCD that used MPEG to split a movie across multiple CDs, iirc.

Usually 2 CDs, at lower resolution than DivX.

I managed to save up enough to get a plextor 8 speed cd writer. I started a record label with it!

the stuff of legend.

few days ago I saw a yamaha 24x writer in an electronic dump, it was a god of the second wave of improvements.. weird feeling, almost tempted to take it.

Loved Laser Discs, home theater a decade+ earlier than anyone I knew.

Also had an IDE? 2x CD burner in the late 90s, great for making mix CDs for my car and hoarding warez before moving on to libre software. Good times.

Been a while since I've been ahead of the technology curve, and tend to lag it now. Let others do the debugging, haha.

Yeah. I have a shelf full of laserdisks and a Pioneer player. Annoyingly, it's the sort of thing that I know is probably worth something to someone but has negative value to me taking space. But I can't really be bothered boxing it up and trying to sell it on eBay either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface

BTW: anybody remembers Commodore CDTV? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV

Who could forget Mehdis baby, useless and overpriced disaster. And how to recover? by doubling down with CD32!

Found a good series the other day on youtube about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...

The same channel also has some nice videos on CDs and VHS.

Another early project missed here was the MIT Media Lab's "Aspen Interactive Movie Map (1981)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU

...and shortly thereafter, the built-in PC cupholder was born.

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