I remember when Wing Commander III came out and I bought a CD-ROM drive just so I could play it. At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most. CD's were #$%^ing magical. Suddenly, games and educational programs could make use of video. Truly, it was a leap forward in technology.
Just a few years later, at university, the "brotherhood of the golden disk" was passing around the latest games on CD-R's. Diamond's first mp3 players were a curiosity the rich kids had, and we were playing mp3's we'd downloaded off of usenet on an ancient sparc3 that could just barely decode them in realtime. I splurged on a CD-R and suddenly I never had to delete anything ever again. When AOL discs arrived in the mail, it seemed strange that anyone would just give away something as valuable as CD's!
A few years later, I was using AOL CD's as coasters. I had a storage box built for 5-1/2" floppies that was now full of CD backups of files I'd never look at again. USB key drives had yet to arrive so, if I wanted to transfer tiny source files around, I'd burn a CD and not worry about all the wasted bits.
Today, a lot of computers don't even come with DVD drives. Apple never even bothered to properly support Bluray. By the time BD-R drives came out, hard-drives were an order of magnitude larger. Now they're nearly two orders of matnitude larger. Backing up a large hard drive onto BD-R's now would be more tedious than backing up a hard-drive to floppy discs when the first CD drives came out. Depending on where you are, it might actually be faster to transmit data half-way across the world than to burn it to a BD-R disk.
In high school, I loaned my best friend my life savings, $7000, with interest, $6k of which was used to purchase a CD writer, which he was planning to use to run a data backup service for local businesses (the other $1k was used to buy RAM... I think maybe 16MB?).
Personally, I find several facts in that paragraph kind of remarkable.
In retrospect, I think the interest rate did not reasonably reflect the high level of risk involved. The CD backup business didn't work out, and we had to renegotiate the terms of the loan, but he did pay me back.
I had a job with MCI (hell that screams old right there) back in the early 90's. They were developing a new project (Perspective, I believe it was called) that would revolutionize the way that billing was done. So instead of shipping a truckload of paper bills to a company like JCPenny, they would just burn the information onto a CD and deliver it. I recall being told that the CD burner they had bought (which was a box the size of a nightstand) was 100k+.
oh and I think the media cost like $50 per burnable cd (or something like that).
Ahh...CD-ROMs. Those PC-GAMER demo discs are the biggest reason I volunteered to go to the grocery store with mom. Getting them through the plastic wrap and into my pocket was effortless. Sorry, grocery stores.
> At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most
Not even that. IIRC 2GB drives were around but very expensive. 4GB units may even have been commonly available, but certainly not affordable for home use.
I think a little before then I got a 250MB drive to upgrade a PC that had 100MB in total (40MB and 60MB) so even counting it all I didn't have a full CD worth.
The race for size really seemed to heat up soon after though, the growth in multimedia content increasing consumer demand high enough to bring prices down (starting a spiral as people generally having more space encouraged developers and publishers to use more and higher definition content). IIRC 1GB drives (still only one-ana-bit full CDs worth) were fairly common in home PCs in 1996 (the year before I went to university), and a couple of tens of GB was common by 1999.
I remember that the PC my parents got in 1996 couldn't even hold one CD of data. (~500 MB, but Encarta 95 that came with it was >600 MB) My parents were and still are cheapskates.
Yup, back in those days games required the CD in to play not because they had to check you bought the game but because the games actually required the resources on the disc.
My parents were so cheap I didn't even have encarta but some cheap IBM branded clone.
I'm a bit old school i guess i still have a wall of old CD's i probably won't ever need of programs, music, movies old outdated versions of software and backups.
CDs, DVDs and Blurays are just so cheap that i still write things to disk when I'm not certain i would need something in the future.
And i have to say it pays keeping things sometimes since the internet is ever changing and what used to be easy to find 10 years ago is almost impossible now.
I guess I'm somewhat of a collector just like the archive team.
If you'd not be willing to part with your physical discs, but if you'd be willing/interested in/have the time to make an archive copy (.ISO) and upload them to the Internet Archive - it would be greatly appreciated. As you say, the Internet is ever changing. By uploading archive copies, I'd say you'd be changing the Internet - for the better :-)
Hell, even years later when I was in high school and I was building my PC mostly from spare parts that friends and family gave me, I used to keep a lot of data burned on CDs. My HDDs were maybe 10GB total back then, so I shuffled things around, burning a lot of it to CD-Rs using slow 1x burner.
I digitized a good chunk of a Dutch broadcasters CD collection using a home-built cluster of 10 machines and a very expensive high speed CD reader. The data was shipped back to them (after encoding to MP3) using harddrives. This was a long time ago and the writing was already on the wall for the CD format.
Long term moving media will die but it has definitely surprised me how long they've managed to hold on and what capacities have been achieved.
I remember my dad, who was an IT teacher, buying a CD-ROM drive for a computer at school. The computer was from roughly 1993, and probably had a 210MB hard drive [1]. That site also has the pre-IDE expansion card the external CD-ROM drive was connected to [2].
At the time, linking IT to other subjects was in vogue. He bought about 5 educational CD-ROMs, for science, geography, history, etc, which had far more image and video content that anything we'd experienced before. I spent hours browsing them.
It was 2000-1 when someone in my class had sufficiently useful broadband for him to download DivX films and sell CD-Rs containing them, for about 50p per disc.
I couldn't even tell from the top of my head if the optical device in my desktop supports bluray or not. Not even sure if I ever opened its tray since building the PC 2.5 years ago. I guess I shouldn't have wasted $30 on it.
So different than the time when an upgrade from 4x to 8x CD-R write speed was a big deal to me...
I have a portable USB DVD drive that I can attach for those moments when I really need one. Even those are starting to be hard to find, since they're based on laptop drives and laptops don't have them anymore either.
Blu-ray drives never made it into the "cheap" category, so if you don't know then it probably isn't.
I remember when Wing Commander III came out and I bought a CD-ROM drive just so I could play it. At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most. CD's were #$%^ing magical. Suddenly, games and educational programs could make use of video. Truly, it was a leap forward in technology.
Just a few years later, at university, the "brotherhood of the golden disk" was passing around the latest games on CD-R's. Diamond's first mp3 players were a curiosity the rich kids had, and we were playing mp3's we'd downloaded off of usenet on an ancient sparc3 that could just barely decode them in realtime. I splurged on a CD-R and suddenly I never had to delete anything ever again. When AOL discs arrived in the mail, it seemed strange that anyone would just give away something as valuable as CD's!
A few years later, I was using AOL CD's as coasters. I had a storage box built for 5-1/2" floppies that was now full of CD backups of files I'd never look at again. USB key drives had yet to arrive so, if I wanted to transfer tiny source files around, I'd burn a CD and not worry about all the wasted bits.
Today, a lot of computers don't even come with DVD drives. Apple never even bothered to properly support Bluray. By the time BD-R drives came out, hard-drives were an order of magnitude larger. Now they're nearly two orders of matnitude larger. Backing up a large hard drive onto BD-R's now would be more tedious than backing up a hard-drive to floppy discs when the first CD drives came out. Depending on where you are, it might actually be faster to transmit data half-way across the world than to burn it to a BD-R disk.