Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

Quite a few things fall out of favor and are on bad platforms, no platform at all, or bad quality.

I found a movie I should have access to through Netflix but their new tier system made it unavailable unless I upgraded.

I had a friend barf in my box of cds once. It was a long evening of washing, spraying, and buffing.

But I think of CDs as the start of this era of transience. Every single CD I burned was useless after a couple of years of sitting in a spindle. Most of my 3.5" floppies from the 90s still work fine, with maybe a few bad sectors. I don't know, maybe I bought cheap CDs to start with--I think the factory burned non-writable CDs lasted.

"Prerecorded" CDs are actually not "burned" by a laser (in the way that CD-Rs are) in the factory, but "stamped"/injection molded from a negative. It's a completely different process!

Since there is no photosensitive dye involved on the final prerecorded disc, this makes them orders of magnitude more durable. That dye is what breaks down over time on CD-Rs, making them unreadable.

Oh that's weird, I'm right now as I type this, listening to a CDDA disc I burned in 2009 and it's flawless. At least nothing's getting through the error correction; I suppose I could scan it and check the C1/C2 error rates, but I don't know what they were immediately post-burn to compare to. (I used to scribble the burn date on the front, so combined with the ATIP batch data, I could eventually build up empirical data about which ones failed prematurely. Never came up with enough failures to produce a signal from the noise, but I have all these discs with burn dates on them.)

DVDs were pretty much the opposite. I burned a lot of DVD coasters. Had even more that failed a few months into service. Dual-layer were so expensive for the good blanks, and so dismally unreliable for the cheap blanks, that I seldom bothered -- two mid-grade single-layer discs were cheaper and more reliable.

Floppies have been hit-or-miss for me, they're more susceptible to mildew if stored in a damp basement, and cleaning solutions are a you-get-one-shot affair since you have to cut open the jacket and remove the flexible media. But if kept dry, I've had decent (95%?) success rates from mid-80s-to-early-90s floppies. A drive cleaning disc is essential.

I've read 20 years old CD-Rs without any apparent trouble. Simple trick: do not burn at the highest possible speed. Easily found information at the time.

Do note that some media has a sweet spot recording speed - apparently (as I recently rediscovered in practice), DVD-Rs don't like to be burned too slowly neither.

>Most of my 3.5" floppies from the 90s still work fine, with maybe a few bad sectors.

I never experienced such durability of floppies. here 10% where DOA, and a disk which survived 3 years was a venerable older one. Maybe the warm, humid and dusty air in here?

My experience with 3.5” diskettes was too that they were unreliable- however the older 5.25” ones seemed a lot more durable. I suspect it has to do with the fact that by the end of their market-life 3.5” had to be made super cheap as nobody considered 1.44mb big enough in the late 90s and thus the quality of late-production floppies was low due to cost cutting.

3.5" floppies I think had a certain time-span (1980s - mid 1990s? maybe) when they were mostly good. Also double density disks always felt more reliable to me.

> disastrous random access latency of optical media

In my experience, it wasn't that much of a problem, since unlike HDDs the latency was very predictable (subject to CD drive speed), so programs were written just fine to handle it.

(It probably also helped that the average CD drive speed was faster than the worst-case drive that the program designed for)

I still think developers should be forbidden from having SSDs so they stop writing such terrible programs.

> nor the fear of scratching a favorite game up and potentially ruining it forever

What's funny is that I can't remember when I scratched a CD enough for it to have any noticeable effect. Even the ones my neanderthal friends handled and returned covered in fine scratches worked fine. But it might be just because I kept everything in the original holders and made so many copies of everything; it's possible I just never noticed. I've had the actual disc readers burn out, though (looking at you, Fat PS2).

Man, I loved burning CDs. It felt like magic every time. My whole family was into it. I'd sit there the family's stack of slim jewelcases and spindle of Maxwell CD-RWs. Listening to the satisfying BRRRR and minutes later, out pops your warm copy fresh from the oven. I don't miss the random compatibility and disc protection errors. But when it worked, it was so sick.

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