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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Great feature of DVD-Rs is that someone across the globe cannot just connect to it and steal medical data.

And the doctor across the globe can never access it to save the patients life.

How often is that a problem?

It could be a problem any time someone travels.

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.

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.

This is nonsense, doctors routinely order scans from other doctors or hospitals who have equipment and then view the results.

From the ones they know not somewhere across the globe like mentioned above.

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.

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.

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

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 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

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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 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 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 :(

My local place gave me my MRI on a branded thumb drive. After I took it to my Ortho, he said I could use the drive for whatever I wanted

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!"

Tell me more about raidz and resiver…

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

> Most of your stuff will be recycled by your grandkids.

Could you explain this? Why would they do that?

- 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.

It's not going to be like the Domesday Book.

Yes, it's actually incredibly easy, if not always convenient, to read most of these old formats.

> But those were also not-so-popular formats/codecs that were replaced quickly by better stuff.

Yes, but nobody said "let's get back and reencode everything in a new, better format"

> - 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.

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.

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.

Most people have no use for the things their parents or grandparents found sentimental or worth keeping, so they toss it.

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.

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'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.

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.

Those were physical artefacts. They are a lot harder to handle, and don't get any smaller as time progresses.

Here we are talking about data.

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.

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.

> 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.

That would be one of the worst options. Finding a working tape drive in the future will be inconvenient enough that nobody will bother

Why? Just pick an industry standard tape. There's still a big market for them, and will be for approximately forever.

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.

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…):

https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml

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.

> 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.

Depends where you live ;)

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.

What is a "marshmallow test"? I've never heard that phrase before?

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_experim...

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.

Children, um, don't use this kind of reasoning.

Depends on the exact age, and how much your kid expects to be trolled.

You mean that study, where they forgot to check for affluence?

https://behavioralscientist.org/try-to-resist-misinterpretin...

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.

Somewhat dated by the reference to tapes but still true overall:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/n...

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 ?

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_pdp-p...

>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.

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"

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.

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?

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

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.

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?)

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