Not the cases the CD came in though. You had to buy special cases that where compatible with your CD player. Handy, but it started to get expensive once you had more than 20 or so CDs.
Wow, I never knew this. Can you give an example of such a system? My initial search has returned nothing.
Also, our early CD drives for our computer had this, except the caddy could be opened up and the CD inside changed. We had one caddy for the computer.
AFAIK it was an open question, if they were going the diskette way, or go with open discs. The polycarbonate plastic was deemed so tough, and of course it was cheaper to just produce the discs without a caddy, so they went with naked discs. IIRC.
Yep. It's too bad the CD format didn't specify this caddy, so that every commercial CD came in a caddy and was non-removable from it.
I guess you weren't alive back then because.... no, no they weren't, this never happened.
You don't know what you're talking about. I had one of these types of CD drives in my first decent computer. It used special cases with a spring loaded cover that opened when you inserted it into the drive.
I know what you're referring to, but I think you're talking about something different to the grandparent. They said "The first CD players let you stick the disk in with case and all. You would never get a scratch" which implies something where you never take the disc out of its case, because unless you never take it out of the case how does it avoid all scratches?
The case could very well have been the caddy. There wasn't a practical reason to have both; it was a design decision.
I don't think there was a caddy for every single CD. My recollection was that you had a single caddy for the drive and swapped discs in and out of it. So I don't see how the caddies made much practical difference for stopping CDs from getting scratched.
It depends on the user. We had caddies for almost every CD we regularly used.