
The Dawn of PC Multimedia: Laser Discs and CD-ROMs (2013) - gwern
http://www.filfre.net/2013/05/the-dawn-of-multimedia/
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amatecha
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/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/amatecha/9930279265/)

~~~
chiph
> 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.

~~~
amatecha
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 :)

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k__
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.

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

Good old Walnut Creek CDROM.

~~~
digi_owl
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.

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Same here, back in the days when stuff wasn't outdated every week :D

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United857
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair_\(1983_video_game\))

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

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

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olivermarks
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...

~~~
digi_owl
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.

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

~~~
kccqzy
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.

~~~
digi_owl
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.

~~~
glandium
Usually 2 CDs, at lower resolution than DivX.

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

~~~
agumonkey
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.

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mixmastamyk
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.

~~~
ghaff
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.

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reitanqild
BTW: anybody remembers Commodore CDTV?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV)

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

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoSTlUIxY7VkJLi)

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

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU)

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

