…and it was called NERO because it burnt ROM
“CloneCD uses a logo of a sheep because at the time it was relevant, the biggest news in cloning research was Dolly the sheep.”
Meh, burning CDs… ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?
(To be fair, neither did I, probably; my earliest hard drive was already IDE, I believe, and those seem to have already had autopark, but the old lore was that you parked your hard drives before moving them, or the heads would scratch the surface, so park them we did.)
ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?
Yes, also you parked it before shutting down the system every time. Once the hard drive was powered down, the heads would just crash into the platters. While not instantly fatal, it wasn’t good for the drive. So, you’d park the drive before flipping the power switch.
Ever have a hard drive with the head stepper motor visible outside?
Not that I recall, no.
My first one was a 65MB (or was it 85MB?) 3.5’’ parallel ATA one, and while the enclosure might have been shaped around the platter(s?) (could have been a later one, though) I don’t recall the motor being distinguishable.
Whole machine (my first PC proper) was a 286, 16MHz with turbo on, possibly 1024KB of RAM (I recall setting up autoexec.bat to ask me if I needed extended or expanded memory on boot, but could’ve been in a later machine; pretty certain the memory was on socketed DIPs on the mainboard, not SIMMs, in any case, so it can’t have been much, and 640KB was supposed to be enough, anyway), CGA, 5.25’’ and possibly 3.5’’ floppy drive, DOS… 4.something, I believe.
Good times.
Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn’t actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.
This is part of why you could burn “faster”, although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.
I am very, very old.
I am very, very old
Good job !
And thanks for the explanation.
Me explaining what “Insert Disk 2 of 5” means.
This is like Technology Connections having to explain what an MP3 CD is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIR23emsWY
“The ‘burn’ part is like what the climate change does, which you are familiar with.
The ‘CD’ part is like your brain, where the ‘burn’ causes microplastics to melt in a pattern that stores data.”“Now kids, can anyone tell me why the historians often say ‘CDs nutz’?”
I had a program that came with special CD Labels for the printer where you could make your own cool CD label covers. that was fun.
Or going into a Dreamcast IRC channel to download games and burn them to disk. I think I only ever actually bought like 2 Dreamcast games, Shenmue and Seaman, the rest were just burned to CD-Rs.
Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools
I had to explain what a CD was to my kids the other day because I saw a CD-ROM mirror and decided to get one. We didn’t even cover what “burning” one was.
Nah, I’d end up explaining why floppy discs weren’t floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.
They were floppy though?
At least 8 inch, and 5.25 inch. 3.5 only on the inside (unless enough force is applied xD).
By 3.5" you ofc mean:
/s
The larger ones were flexible, not floppy—they could be bent without cracking the casing, but wouldn’t just bend under their own weight.
If you held them by a side and shaked them, they were definitely floppy.
I downloaded a 1GB update on my phone today and it took a couple minutes. I spaced out remembering how fucking advanced it felt getting a x2 CD burner.
Then you try to do anything else with that PC while it’s writing at 300 KBps and… buffer underrun. So many coasters.
I remember when some company started advertising “BURN-proof” CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened “buffer underrun” to “BURN”, and because, you know, “burning” was the entire point of a CD-R drive.
It worked though. Buffer underruns weren’t a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.
