I still have a copy of Nero Express on a DVD in my bookcase.
Not that I use it very much - if I ever need to burn an iso Ill use xfburn or brasero or something like that, as I run Linux now. It's more if I need to burn data onto disk's to get it off an older PC.
You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don't know how to navigate file systems, they don't know where they saved anything, they don't even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn't understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don't even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can't count the number of times I've seen an error message that just says "an error has occurred" and you're left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone's app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it's the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like "An error has occurred".
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
If the error message is that stupid, I'm 100% with you. I suspect that's the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don't understand that information, it's not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they're participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don't know because they have dismissed it.
Almost every finished product I've seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you're technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it's not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol
Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University's computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn't download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She'd attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say "see?! It's not working!!". I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking "no" 🤦♂️
Quck note on that, many smart devices have trouble with wifi if the 2,4 ghz and 5 ghz have the same name. Rename the one of the two and it mostly works.
I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said "my computer doesn't work, please take a look" and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:
The tower was off but the monitors were on
The tower was on but the monitors were off
Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn't blame them for this one)
These people were in their 40s and didn't know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say "I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!". After about a month of this I would just say "Hi", press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.
My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn't know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.
I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”
It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.
You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.
Back in the early 2010s I was helping a girl at my University's computer lab that I worked at that didn't know how to print from Microsoft Office. Granted it was like a year or so after they hid everything behind that stupid button in the upper right hand corner, but still...
Hell, i run Linux on everything and I hate technology, there are just so many helpful guides and everything is so easy to fix, until it isn't...
So funny story I recently remembed a situation in my early years of running Ubuntu 8.04(I miss the old gnome days), I spent MONTHS trying to get an ir remote to do various things on the computer(play/pause vlc, run apt-get, whatever random shit I thought of at the time) only for the whole thing to never pan out, the recent realization that I had tried to do such a useless thing(it was a laptop) and spent too many night frustrated in tears made me laugh.
It sounds similar to what google does where it uses a tag for categorizing instead of physical movement of a file into a folder system. Handy for exclusive use if everything exists for one purpose on the one os that uses it. An absolute pain in the ass when you need to conveniently back stuff up or require compatibility.
They do use folders but I haven't known anyone except older people to really utilize them. Most people just search for them. It's flash memory and relatively few files so searching is faster then clicking through folders.
file management up until very recently was very basic and even now is very limited. there is no access to any files that apps use besides downloads from Chrome and whatnot.
there isn't really a downloads folder per se, only a downloads section. besides that, files can be tagged to help find them and folders are just something deemed unnecessary. everything is just saved into a "space". there is no implication that there is a root directory of sorts, only a space where files are and you let the phone search for it.
when you save pictures from a website, there is an option to save as image, but in the photo gallery, there is an option to save it into the files app, implying that files and photos are different things. you can't access photos from the files app, you HAVE to access them from the photos app. this one really frustrates me.
I have only used iOS in the days where the iPhone 6S was relavant and never went back, so do correct me if anything I said was wrong.
Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn't know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.
Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.
If your mechanic said, "I'm not much of a wrench person" you'd take your car elsewhere.
If your typical office worker said, "I'm not much of a computer person" , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say "I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!"
You're in the same boat I am. I'm doing IT support and one user couldn't navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used "file open" dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word's open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.
It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn't even try to correct their methods. I was just like, "okay", and moved on.
It's not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things.... Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that's probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow.... They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not "get" that there's a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.
Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.
I hate hearing "I don't know computers" or "I'm not very good with technology" .... You use it every day. There's some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being "bad" with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.
We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they're connecting to isn't there.
Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn't got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.
Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.
Look at all these rich people in the comments with their car stereos that could play CD-RW. Some of us were lucky to have one that would play CD-R 80% of the time, and it was completely brand agnostic.
I got a Sony CDP once that wouldn't play burned CDs. Not sure if it was a hardware issue with that one CDP, or if it affected the model itself. I returned it and got a different one and it works with burned CDs. To this day it's a mystery
Alright Scrooge McDuck driving your Rolls-Royce with a CD player, any car I could afford to drive still had a tape deck even by the time I had a phone to plug into it via an adapter!
Back then we could pull the factory radio out, and replace it with a new one. And it was easy.
I duplicated CDs for a while for the car, then bought a new car stereo that could play MP3s and condensed my collection onto 3 discs. I left the discs in the car when I sold it
I never had the luxury of an easy replacement, I always had to deal with jank mounts that had to be cut to fit the car and stereo, and then there was the mess of wires to hook up. That's what I get for trying to jam 1990s technology in to 70s and 80s cars...
They went that expensive at least by 2000, I put one in my 99' Neon for like 200$. It actually could play MP3 discs! I had one disc with a shit load of songs that was my default disc in the player.
To be fair, CD/DVD burning peaked and declined extremely quickly in comparison to most other media technology. We went from nobody having a CD burner to most people ditching DVDs for blu ray and/or streaming in what, 15 years?
Burning cd's for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1995..latest
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
Funny anecdote; my friend's mother referred to the cd burner as "the cd crusher" in the late 90's, I guess it's easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
For a short while, you could get CD players that also played MP3s burned onto a CD-R. You could put a ton of MP3s on one CD-R. I had lots of BBC radio dramas on them. All lost now, sadly. And there doesn't seem to be anyone archiving them anymore despite daily dramas.
I recently purchased an old Toyota from 2009, which had the TOTL audio system including an MP3 compatible cd player and Bluetooth (voice/phone-only). I ended up using the cd tray as a slot for a phone holder, and use a Bluetooth LDAC dongle connected to the AUX input. But I'm gonna burn an old school MP3 cd and leave it in the glove box for a rainy day :)
There’s going to be some variance depending on how a person tends to listen to their music. I think the decline of CDs correlates pretty well with digital options being available, and people making the switch. There’s always going to be people at the head of the pack using the new thing and people that want to save costs by keeping what they’ve got. The accessory market affects that too, there was overlap when people would have portable digital music players, but still use optical disks for their home stereo and vehicles. But as manufacturers came out with solutions like iPod docks or Bluetooth streaming the digital devices were able to push out the physical media.
USB flash drives took way longer to catch on than most people remember, thanks to how ubiquitous they are now. It took ages for them to become large enough to be worth a damn, for the plurality of computers to be compatible enough to support them, and for them to become affordable enough for anyone other than nerds or businessmen with an expense account to care. And then USB 2.0 just would not gain widespread adoption for what felt like about a century, so even what was available was inevitably agonizingly slow even if it had any kind of capacity.
There was a solid chunk of time between about 1997 and 2006 when a CD-R was not only monumentally cheaper than flash media but was also much more likely to work in any random computer or other device you stuck it into. Prior to about 2003 you couldn't realistically even buy a flash drive that held as much data as a humble CD-R in the first place. In 2004 a 256 megabyte USB flash drive would run you $50 and operate at piddling USB 1.1 speed, but a 700 megabyte CD-R was 20 cents. That helped the CD-R and certainly the DVD+/-R formats to hang on well past their supposed sell-by date.
(And I just checked, since I was morbidly curious. A Verbatim CD-R still costs about 21 cents per disc at Microcenter. Yes, you can still buy them.)
A later large portion of the application for writable CD's was, I'm sure you'll remember, good old fashioned wholesome piracy. At 20 cents each it was cheap and easy to run off a copied CD full of whatever to give to your friends and not expect to get it back. So even after flash drives became affordable, they were never never affordable enough for most people to do that.
The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.
I had a fancy CD/DVD burner in my first laptop circa 2015 and used it very very sparingly. It also had a fancy feature where you could buy special disks that the burner could burn a cover imagine onto. It was crap.
But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.
mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster
What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!
In 1998, the first portable solid-state digital audio player MPMan, developed by SaeHan Information Systems, which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, was released and the Rio PMP300 was sold afterward in 1998, despite legal suppression efforts by the RIAA.
There really werent any clear mp3 players standouts available to the public because of letigious RIAA
But there were many portable cd players that could play mp3 discs when the ipod came out.
Sonys minidisc player was cool, but an absolute flop from success standpoint, we wanted reusable media, burning cds was often a frustrating process.
Ill say it again the RIAA was absolutely (litigiously) against any device they couldnt get their fingers into and apple was happy to work out a deal with them with itunes. The next best thing was napster from a user standpoint(though scourexchange was better imo but lasted about a minute)
Cds were the main way artists released music because rhe RIAA didnt support mp3 anywhere they didnt have to, it took years for people to really switch over to itunes, but they did and streaming took over from there eventually
Not sure why im getting downvotes, but please correct anything you disagree with
Those were created by the legions, mostly cheap Chinese versions whose chips would fail in summer (source: I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina where we have had 40ºC / 104ºF summers and I had many of those sputtering and dying on me).
I fully accept that there were others, but they were not superfluous(not sure if that is the correct word to use but it feels right)
I guess maybe the point was trying to make is that for portable music the cd player was hands down still the best thing until the ipod took over.
Much like the (and credit to Sony here) walkman before it, the discman is still the device that people used for digital music, specifically mp3s, until the ipod came out.
So yeah im saying it took 1 company, apple in this case, to kill the cd. Not because other people werent in the fight, but because of itunes and apples ease of use development
Yeah I didn't either, seemed silly. Re-writing was so much slower too than just straight burning on a CD-R. I still have a bunch in my basement that I may never use up from my last purchase probably nearly a decade ago, lol. I have DVD-R's down there too that I KNOW will never see the light of day, should probably find a new home for them.
They're still useful, someone local may want them for a free pickup. I still keep a spindle of both, for when I'm restoring older laptops and PCs. For drivers and software.
I should drop them for free somewhere probably and see if someone does. When working with computers I just keep a stash of cheap flash drives around. Much easier than burning a CD anyways since new laptops don't usually have CD drives anymore (mine doesn't though I have a USB one around here somewhere).
Yep, I rebuilt an old Pentium III laptop a few weeks ago. The only way to get data onto it was via the 24x CD-ROM drive it has, or by taking the hard drive out of it and mounting it in another computer. I had some CD-Rs and a USB cd burner laying around, so I dusted it off and burned a copy of Windows 98 SE and used it to install the OS on that machine.
Rewritable DVDs, though? Burn a movie you didn’t care about, watch it, know you never want to see it again, burn another movie as if the previous abomination had ever burdened your media…
The little DVD burner <> DVD player pipeline these youths know of not.
It must be the plastic housing that did it. I once saw a CD drive which needed the CDs to be in a plastic shell as well - it looked something like a normal CD case but with a floppy-like sliding cover on the top. Immediately made CDs feel 5x more cool
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap.
USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
You could also write to a CD-R more than once, but you couldn’t truly delete anything (it’d just write to a separate sector on the disc), which would be really frustrating as soon as you could no longer fit your school project on the disc (though, not that it mattered because compatibility of optical media always seemed atrocious anyway… Probably a mix of different versions of PowerPoint or whatever and actual CD compatibility issues).
I agree, but when you introduce someone to math, you don't start with integrals, haha. Thank you though for following up with good info, I almost added some about it, and thought it may make it over the top for an intro
Yeah there was a point after which it became cheaper for the manufacturers to just make read/write drives than produce both.
Fun fact, for a while they would disable the "write" portion. They would sell the same exact drive one for like 99$ that could only read and one for like 199$ that write. Once the techies found out and it started becoming common knowledge they gave up even selling read only drives.
I suppose not everyone had the hardware to cut their own vinyl, so being able to stick the disky thingy in the bleep bloop machine and make your own diskies at home sounded kind of bizarre at first
Yeah my mind went right to this. My dad had a few 45s but that had meant paying for a rehearsal space with recording. That was probably the last major medium the average user couldn't make their own
It started with a Tori Amos lyric about someone burning CDs. I couldn’t imagine why you’d destroy valuable property lol. The term was used originally in industry and later adopted for home use.
In 1993, computers were just starting to get CD-ROM drives and CD-Rs were pretty exotic technology. Being able to burn CD's really didn't really go mainstream until the very late 90's.
The back half of millennials might not have burned CDs either.
The iPod came out in 2001, my first car I played music with a cassette-tape to aux converter and a first or second Gen iPod, my second through a USB stick plugged into an aftermarket deck I bought from Walmart. Music downloaded from Limewire.
The cassette to aux converter felt like black magic back then. I left mine in so long that it made a creaking and snapping sound when I finally took it out when getting rid of the car.
'95 here. I not only burned disks, but we had one of them fancy schmancy monochrome label burner disk drives. So many MS Word font effects were burned that I'm sure I lost 20 IQ points from the plastic fumes.
I had a 64 MB Samsung Yepp mp3 player super early. Didn't stop me from burning CDs at all, considering the player could only store about one CD anyway.
Not sure whether I'm gen Z or millennial, but I definitely burned a lot of CDs. And successfully burned about 20% of them. If even the floor creaked the CD would skip and basically be destroyed.
I may not be the average experience for somebody my age though, considering when I was like 8 I remember using a tape recorder to record my favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette.
Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996.
Gen Z:
~1995~2013
Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years.
I was born in 98, it's just that some people are insistent millennial ends at the year 2000, while others insist on 1996.
I've also heard whether or not you remember 9/11 as the benchmark, and I do, but only barely because I didn't know what was actually happening.
There's also some who say it's whether or not you remember the turn of the millennium, which I don't because I was 2.
The generation borders are just so fuzzy that I'm often tempted to just go with "zillennial," but for some reason people think that's offensive because it "alienates gen Z" or something.
Same lmao. '02 here. I was handed the family tape player and I once used it to record a song from a YouTube video because I couldn't make the computer record itself. I was 12.
I remember once Limewire became popular it was almost a magic trick to get a clean install of it. Most people I knew had a copy that came with all the toolbars and malware.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you'd have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
I had one radio that did all of this but if I didn't hold a fake adapter into the headphone port at exactly the right angle, nothing worked. I put so much effort into being very still to record songs.
I just saw a post on Reddit two days ago that said "During the 80s, did kids really just go outside and run wild for hours or is that just in the movies/TV?" and the same feeling hit haha
I remember many years ago when I was going through a box of my burned CDs and games and realized I could just download any of them whenever I wanted. Plus my computer didn't even have a CD/DVD drive any more. End of an era.
I've got a nearly 20 year old cdrom drive that just keeps getting transfered from build to build because you never know. I don't think I've opened in like 3 years... I'm gonna see if it still does real quick.
Ok it does but there was a driver cd for a motherboard I don't own anymore in it.
I keep a Blu ray/DVD burner in a portable enclosure stored away just in case I want to play some of my older games. (I have a smallish retro game collection at this point in a CD rack in my bookshelf, as well as a few boxes copies. if anything it's cool to look at)
Or I need to burn something on the off chance I need to get data off of a really old computer that my grandparents own or something.
I even keep a cd album of turned recovery disk's for various operating systems. I have DVDs for reinstalling windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10, as well as a bunch of Linux live DVDs/CDs just in case. I always try the USB options first, but if they don't work I can always fall back on the CD/DVD. The portable drive guarantees I can use it even on a PC that doesn't have a drive (provided it's not too old - I don't own floppys because I don't have a FD drive)
I just bought an external CD/DVD read/write. When I built my most recent PC it didn’t have external bays, and I didn’t even worry about it. Changing my tune.
I have a lot of older games on CD, music files, and movies.
The games I actually own, that can’t be randomly shut off by lack of support. Music files not tied to a streaming service. Movies I can rip and put on my own home media server.
That old tech is still useful. It’s from an age before you “rented” your music, movies (blockbuster notwithstanding), and games.
Good ol' WinAmp. I remember rockin' out to all the mp3s I could possibly pirate on WinAmp while chatting to all my friends on ICQ. Now I listen to podcasts on Spotify while yelling at kids to get off my lawn and putting A535 on my aching back.
I mean I just bought a cd DVD burner. I have a ton of blank DVD and a blank cd to burn songs for my dad. It is still nice to own a physical copy of something.
I'm glad I no longer have to be concerned with Nero. But there were many alternatives after a while. This one was my favorite: https://www.imgburn.com/
What about Video 2000? The audio quality was so much better that when we finally switched to a VHS player I thought there was something wrong with the cable connecting it to the TV.
I don't think it was ever available outside of Europe, but it had some major advantages such as a completely bonkers 8 hours run time per tape, perfect still images without distortion, and the ability to reverse or fast forward without the artifacts you'd see on VHS and Betamax.
I remember being the first person anyone knew who had a deck to deck burner, it was a Teac, TDK, or a Kenwood, don't remember that well. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time and was bootlegging discs for all of the people in my friends group. Everyone would bring their own spindle of blank discs and we would drink and swap discs until we either went out to go party or until everyone had copies of what they wanted. Eventually I got a few more burner decks to make things quicker, and then I sold off the extra decks to friends before moving away. Not too long after the devices were completely useless as everyone started having a burner built into their PC and just about everyone soon had a PC, still sold my last burner deck for more than I bought it for.
I didn't have a deck to deck, but somehow managed to convince my mom to buy me a bay mounted burner when they very first were hitting stores. There was a local video rental shop, that also rented out PC games for like $2 ea. I copied as many of those suckers as I could convince my parents to rent me over the course of that summer.
Remember when Netflix mailed DVDs? We would rip and make copies as soon as the mail was delivered, to try to get them back to the post office before 3pm. I think you could rent 3 or 4 disks at a time?
God I used to hate DJ's that would talk up to the post. Used to record all my music from the air from the late night DJ's because they would often just queue up a few songs with no talking.
I was behind a kid in Chipotle last week that had an honest to god Walkman on him with the original headphones. it seemed WAY larger than I remembered.
I have an older friend who was a big time DJ in the 80's. He has some stories that'll turn your head. Apparently the industry was very party focused back then.
Lmao I had a walkman, and I remember that the less power the batteries had, the slower the tape played. Sometimes I didn't even knew if the song was playing at full speed.
One of the things I remember most is that cheap, defective or old drives can just fuck up the burning process and now you have a useless disk of plastic you can use as a bad freesbee. I never used the fastest burn option for that reason and still had like 1\40 failed burns 'cause my drive was all cheap, defective and old. With how rarely used they are rn, the price of such failure can grow pretty quick. Some of my relatives in the 00s used them as holiday decorations, wall-mounted them on a string as they are shiny and reflective. Although cringe, it's a little better than just throwing them in a dumpster, I guess.
If you put them in the microwave for a few seconds they get this cool crackle effect on the shiny side. If you've got one of those old "skip repair" doohickeys that buffed it in a radial pattern that's nice too. Keep some plain for a nice contrast.
you had a tiny needle and a little hammer, and you would look through a jeweler's loupe to see where to carve in the 1s and the 0s. It was a golden age.
Yeah I'm not gonna lie this is me. I've burned iso's to CDs before but I really not get it. The cds I had could only be burned once and then got write protected and I didn't know how to undo to. I'm just gonna stick with my flash drives
it is a lost art now, I still have an unopened box of DVDs... Somewhere.
I have very fond memories setting up the candle and tuning the laser prism just right, following Razor 1911 instructions to set everything up correctly. While trying not to burn a hole in the walls of the house.
One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they're absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don't think a single disk survived that year.
I also remember when my school got a fancy new "computer lab" that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.
Do you mean 5-1/4" ? While 7" did exist they were extremely rare outside of research academia/business and even then fairly rare. The main stream computers like the Apple IIe (in 82' ?) Came with 5-1/5" floppies. The IIe, being an extremely popular public school choice.
This is fake because "burning" is a CD specific term, and no real Gen Z would know that you "burn" a CD to put music on it.
Most would probably just assume it works like a USB stick or any regular digital storage format.
It's like how a hilariously large amount of people don't know what the origin of "mixtape" is. They think its just a word that defines music mixes, because no one knows what a cassette player is anymore, or that people actually used to create and sell mixtapes.
Fuck, some of the younger rappers actually put out mixtape cassettes now. There's a fairly brisk but low demand market for not only used tapes, but there's bands releasing them im special editions.
I'm kinda regretting dumping some of my old tapes. I kept the stuff that's impossible to replace (local bands mostly), but I sometimes get nostalgic for the liners. Not the sound being shitty, or how fast tapes wear out, or anything else about the format, but there was something coool about the way the liners unfolded that isn't as satisfying with CDs, or even vinyl.
I'm in a band and we make cassette tapes. They sell like hot cakes. Our last run sold out in a single day on bandcamp. Many people buy them and don't even have cassette players. They're cheap to make and I think many people just want a cool souvenir.
Have never burned CDs, but I assume I would take our CD player (which i'm pretty sure has a burning mode), plug it in to my computer, and look up "how to burn CDs"
You need a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW drive in your computer, or externally to write to any of those formats. A DVD-RW can write, or burn (because the laser is literally burning the information onto the disk) to all four formats of disk.
Some computer CD drives (They were called Burners at the start, but near the end most CD-rom drives would also burn CDs) would do it with software. It would eventually be nearly as easy as copying data to a USB drive.
Chances are you could put in a blank disc and the computer will present a folder as a representation of the disc. Copy whatever into the folder and click the burn button on the top right of the folder
To be frank I am a 30 year old and had to think hard to remember how to burn a cd, and even then. I remember that you just picked the option to burn a cd lol. Remember when you actually needed 2 cd rom drives because images weren't a thing.
I still do it, granted I had to get an external CD drive to do so, but still. You put the blank one in and click "Burn CD" in your Zune software, it isn't that hard.
The household tower when I was young had 2 CD drives. The actual computer wasn't much, but boy, do I remember all the burning my mom had me do for her peoples
So we had special disk drives that basically zapped holes in a CD that played music or stored data. That's why we call it 'burning'
And get this: You didn't burn 4000 CDs. You burned one, sent it up to Sony in New Jersey, they cracked it open and then pushed it again polymer en masse to duplicate the CD. They called this "pressing."
Pressed CDs had holes (or "pits") in them. Burned CDs used the laser to change the color of a dye. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as cool as "zapping holes" in the disc.
There was a program call "Nero burning ROM". A pun I understood much later
Well fuck me, that's a name I haven't heard for close to 20 years and it didn't twig until just now.
Ah fuck, I remember Nero, and I know why it is called Nero (because Nero and the burning of rome), but I never connect the ROM to ROME.
The logo was literally the colosseum on fire...
Oh I know about that, just the connection of Rom and Rome.
Ah, ok. Makes even more sense knowing that Nero is a German company, and the city is literally spelled Rom in German.
Exact same sentiment. Mind blown
Emperor Nero is rumored to have cause the great fire of Rome in 64 AD that burned over 2/3rds of the city
and legend had it as he watched Rome burn, he played the fiddle
*lyre
Pans on fire.
Did he cause the fire, or did a fire happen while he was the leader and he completely ignored it?
Yes
Nero, the Roman emperor, burned Rome.
ok I never thought I would need this info about CD burning but this is genuinely a cool revelation about my childhood
Go look up the loading screen for Nero. It was a burning colosseum. Such a cool branding job.
And now I just got it too lol
E: never let it be said I am not slow on the uptake. 🙄
Core memory unlocked!
I still have a copy of Nero Express on a DVD in my bookcase.
Not that I use it very much - if I ever need to burn an iso Ill use xfburn or brasero or something like that, as I run Linux now. It's more if I need to burn data onto disk's to get it off an older PC.
Adaptec Easy CD Creator. Then I got a copy of Nero from a friend and never looked back.
And these things called optical drives.
You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don't know how to navigate file systems, they don't know where they saved anything, they don't even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn't understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don't even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
"There's an error message on my screen."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can't count the number of times I've seen an error message that just says "an error has occurred" and you're left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone's app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it's the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like "An error has occurred".
If the error message is that stupid, I'm 100% with you. I suspect that's the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don't understand that information, it's not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they're participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don't know because they have dismissed it.
Almost every finished product I've seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you're technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it's not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol
Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University's computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn't download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She'd attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say "see?! It's not working!!". I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking "no" 🤦♂️
Quck note on that, many smart devices have trouble with wifi if the 2,4 ghz and 5 ghz have the same name. Rename the one of the two and it mostly works.
I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said "my computer doesn't work, please take a look" and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:
The tower was off but the monitors were on
The tower was on but the monitors were off
Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn't blame them for this one)
These people were in their 40s and didn't know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say "I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!". After about a month of this I would just say "Hi", press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.
My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn't know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.
I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”
It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.
You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.
Back in the early 2010s I was helping a girl at my University's computer lab that I worked at that didn't know how to print from Microsoft Office. Granted it was like a year or so after they hid everything behind that stupid button in the upper right hand corner, but still...
Hell, i run Linux on everything and I hate technology, there are just so many helpful guides and everything is so easy to fix, until it isn't...
So funny story I recently remembed a situation in my early years of running Ubuntu 8.04(I miss the old gnome days), I spent MONTHS trying to get an ir remote to do various things on the computer(play/pause vlc, run apt-get, whatever random shit I thought of at the time) only for the whole thing to never pan out, the recent realization that I had tried to do such a useless thing(it was a laptop) and spent too many night frustrated in tears made me laugh.
that's a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.
Could you clarify what this means? I've never used an iPhone, so I'm not familiar with how they handle files.
Do they not use folders?
It sounds similar to what google does where it uses a tag for categorizing instead of physical movement of a file into a folder system. Handy for exclusive use if everything exists for one purpose on the one os that uses it. An absolute pain in the ass when you need to conveniently back stuff up or require compatibility.
They do use folders but I haven't known anyone except older people to really utilize them. Most people just search for them. It's flash memory and relatively few files so searching is faster then clicking through folders.
file management up until very recently was very basic and even now is very limited. there is no access to any files that apps use besides downloads from Chrome and whatnot.
there isn't really a downloads folder per se, only a downloads section. besides that, files can be tagged to help find them and folders are just something deemed unnecessary. everything is just saved into a "space". there is no implication that there is a root directory of sorts, only a space where files are and you let the phone search for it.
when you save pictures from a website, there is an option to save as image, but in the photo gallery, there is an option to save it into the files app, implying that files and photos are different things. you can't access photos from the files app, you HAVE to access them from the photos app. this one really frustrates me.
I have only used iOS in the days where the iPhone 6S was relavant and never went back, so do correct me if anything I said was wrong.
To be fair, there has been people unable to navigate file systems at all times.
Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn't know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.
Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.
If your mechanic said, "I'm not much of a wrench person" you'd take your car elsewhere.
If your typical office worker said, "I'm not much of a computer person" , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say "I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!"
Dont they also use cloud services that have folders?
"I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I'm late on my project. Can't you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?"
You're in the same boat I am. I'm doing IT support and one user couldn't navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used "file open" dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word's open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.
It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn't even try to correct their methods. I was just like, "okay", and moved on.
It's not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things.... Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that's probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow.... They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not "get" that there's a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.
Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.
I hate hearing "I don't know computers" or "I'm not very good with technology" .... You use it every day. There's some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being "bad" with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.
The more infuriating cases were "I don't know, I pressed Enter".
We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they're connecting to isn't there.
Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn't got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.
Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.
Look at all these rich people in the comments with their car stereos that could play CD-RW. Some of us were lucky to have one that would play CD-R 80% of the time, and it was completely brand agnostic.
I got a JVC head in like 2002 that could play MP3 cds. I was the king.
MP3 cds blew my mind and that’s what made me understand the difference between analog and digital in regard to files and music.
How can there be 100 songs on some cds and only 12 on others? Well that’s why.
Technically the regular audio CD is a digital format too, but it’s uncompressed.
It's compression, baby. I don't get mad at bad high-hat sound if there are 100 songs on the disc.
I got a Sony CDP once that wouldn't play burned CDs. Not sure if it was a hardware issue with that one CDP, or if it affected the model itself. I returned it and got a different one and it works with burned CDs. To this day it's a mystery
Sony did a lot to develop drm for disc's. I bet not playing burned disc's was an intentional design decision.
I had one of these bad boys for work, its a Sony.
It could play mp3 CDRW discs. It was an amazing device.
I’d forgotten about those! SO many tracks!
Alright Scrooge McDuck driving your Rolls-Royce with a CD player, any car I could afford to drive still had a tape deck even by the time I had a phone to plug into it via an adapter!
Back then we could pull the factory radio out, and replace it with a new one. And it was easy.
I duplicated CDs for a while for the car, then bought a new car stereo that could play MP3s and condensed my collection onto 3 discs. I left the discs in the car when I sold it
I never had the luxury of an easy replacement, I always had to deal with jank mounts that had to be cut to fit the car and stereo, and then there was the mess of wires to hook up. That's what I get for trying to jam 1990s technology in to 70s and 80s cars...
Mine were a corolla and a commodore. The first had a standard rectangular 1 unit space; the second had a standard 2 unit space
It made it super easy. I wish all followed that standard. Stock audio sucked
My setup couldn't even do that. But hey I had a tape player...
They went that expensive at least by 2000, I put one in my 99' Neon for like 200$. It actually could play MP3 discs! I had one disc with a shit load of songs that was my default disc in the player.
I only ever made like 2 CDs that worked in my life. And I NEVER burned a DVD that worked.
To be fair, CD/DVD burning peaked and declined extremely quickly in comparison to most other media technology. We went from nobody having a CD burner to most people ditching DVDs for blu ray and/or streaming in what, 15 years?
Burning cd's for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1995..latest
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
Funny anecdote; my friend's mother referred to the cd burner as "the cd crusher" in the late 90's, I guess it's easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.
For a short while, you could get CD players that also played MP3s burned onto a CD-R. You could put a ton of MP3s on one CD-R. I had lots of BBC radio dramas on them. All lost now, sadly. And there doesn't seem to be anyone archiving them anymore despite daily dramas.
I recently purchased an old Toyota from 2009, which had the TOTL audio system including an MP3 compatible cd player and Bluetooth (voice/phone-only). I ended up using the cd tray as a slot for a phone holder, and use a Bluetooth LDAC dongle connected to the AUX input. But I'm gonna burn an old school MP3 cd and leave it in the glove box for a rainy day :)
Don't forget USB sticks and file storage services like DropBox.
CD burning was mostly dead by the mid-to-late naughties. Streaming came later.
Not really, I still had plenty of people who used CDs up until 2010 at least.
There’s going to be some variance depending on how a person tends to listen to their music. I think the decline of CDs correlates pretty well with digital options being available, and people making the switch. There’s always going to be people at the head of the pack using the new thing and people that want to save costs by keeping what they’ve got. The accessory market affects that too, there was overlap when people would have portable digital music players, but still use optical disks for their home stereo and vehicles. But as manufacturers came out with solutions like iPod docks or Bluetooth streaming the digital devices were able to push out the physical media.
USB flash drives took way longer to catch on than most people remember, thanks to how ubiquitous they are now. It took ages for them to become large enough to be worth a damn, for the plurality of computers to be compatible enough to support them, and for them to become affordable enough for anyone other than nerds or businessmen with an expense account to care. And then USB 2.0 just would not gain widespread adoption for what felt like about a century, so even what was available was inevitably agonizingly slow even if it had any kind of capacity.
There was a solid chunk of time between about 1997 and 2006 when a CD-R was not only monumentally cheaper than flash media but was also much more likely to work in any random computer or other device you stuck it into. Prior to about 2003 you couldn't realistically even buy a flash drive that held as much data as a humble CD-R in the first place. In 2004 a 256 megabyte USB flash drive would run you $50 and operate at piddling USB 1.1 speed, but a 700 megabyte CD-R was 20 cents. That helped the CD-R and certainly the DVD+/-R formats to hang on well past their supposed sell-by date.
(And I just checked, since I was morbidly curious. A Verbatim CD-R still costs about 21 cents per disc at Microcenter. Yes, you can still buy them.)
A later large portion of the application for writable CD's was, I'm sure you'll remember, good old fashioned wholesome piracy. At 20 cents each it was cheap and easy to run off a copied CD full of whatever to give to your friends and not expect to get it back. So even after flash drives became affordable, they were never never affordable enough for most people to do that.
The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.
I had a fancy CD/DVD burner in my first laptop circa 2015 and used it very very sparingly. It also had a fancy feature where you could buy special disks that the burner could burn a cover imagine onto. It was crap.
The IPod killed CDs i think is pretty established
There were other attempts, like the Diamond Rio
But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.
mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster
What mp3 player had any success compared to the ipod?!
There really werent any clear mp3 players standouts available to the public because of letigious RIAA
But there were many portable cd players that could play mp3 discs when the ipod came out.
Sonys minidisc player was cool, but an absolute flop from success standpoint, we wanted reusable media, burning cds was often a frustrating process.
Ill say it again the RIAA was absolutely (litigiously) against any device they couldnt get their fingers into and apple was happy to work out a deal with them with itunes. The next best thing was napster from a user standpoint(though scourexchange was better imo but lasted about a minute)
Cds were the main way artists released music because rhe RIAA didnt support mp3 anywhere they didnt have to, it took years for people to really switch over to itunes, but they did and streaming took over from there eventually
Not sure why im getting downvotes, but please correct anything you disagree with
A whole 128MB of storage.
Man I've seen Dankpods hit so many of those with a brick.
old mate 1 grit
First of all, love the username.
Second, what was that one, and do you happen to know when it was released?
Those were created by the legions, mostly cheap Chinese versions whose chips would fail in summer (source: I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina where we have had 40ºC / 104ºF summers and I had many of those sputtering and dying on me).
I fully accept that there were others, but they were not superfluous(not sure if that is the correct word to use but it feels right)
I guess maybe the point was trying to make is that for portable music the cd player was hands down still the best thing until the ipod took over.
Much like the (and credit to Sony here) walkman before it, the discman is still the device that people used for digital music, specifically mp3s, until the ipod came out.
So yeah im saying it took 1 company, apple in this case, to kill the cd. Not because other people werent in the fight, but because of itunes and apples ease of use development
“Lasers”
Many monks would spend months on illuminating just one CD.
I'll never forget the chant:
"See-Dee Rahm, See-Dee Aye, See-Dee Are Plus, See-Dee Are Minus, Are Double-yew."
zzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…
vrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
And if you got a real good one, you'll have a couple of extra vrrrrmmmmmmmms after that, if the disk was well balanced enough
CD-RWs were truly the flash drives of their day
I legit never reused a CD in my life. With how cheap CD-R was, I'd just buy a spindle and burner go brrrrrrrr.
Yeah I didn't either, seemed silly. Re-writing was so much slower too than just straight burning on a CD-R. I still have a bunch in my basement that I may never use up from my last purchase probably nearly a decade ago, lol. I have DVD-R's down there too that I KNOW will never see the light of day, should probably find a new home for them.
They're still useful, someone local may want them for a free pickup. I still keep a spindle of both, for when I'm restoring older laptops and PCs. For drivers and software.
I should drop them for free somewhere probably and see if someone does. When working with computers I just keep a stash of cheap flash drives around. Much easier than burning a CD anyways since new laptops don't usually have CD drives anymore (mine doesn't though I have a USB one around here somewhere).
But flash drives don't come with a free bagel holder 😂
Yep, I rebuilt an old Pentium III laptop a few weeks ago. The only way to get data onto it was via the 24x CD-ROM drive it has, or by taking the hard drive out of it and mounting it in another computer. I had some CD-Rs and a USB cd burner laying around, so I dusted it off and burned a copy of Windows 98 SE and used it to install the OS on that machine.
I even re-used DVD-Rs. You can format the empty portion on them. I just hate creating waste if extra life can be squeezed out of it.
Rewritable DVDs, though? Burn a movie you didn’t care about, watch it, know you never want to see it again, burn another movie as if the previous abomination had ever burdened your media…
The little DVD burner <> DVD player pipeline these youths know of not.
You talkin' shit about my Iomega!?
Oh, I wanted one of those so badly! Digital, yet with an analog "cassette-y" feel, just like the minidisc.
It must be the plastic housing that did it. I once saw a CD drive which needed the CDs to be in a plastic shell as well - it looked something like a normal CD case but with a floppy-like sliding cover on the top. Immediately made CDs feel 5x more cool
Actually, that would be the less used DVD-RAM. It had sectors like HDD, and could be formatted with regular FSs, like HDD, and written to like HDD.
In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
https://www.newegg.com/p/105-00B4-00001?item=9SIAKF3DSX2734&cm_sp=SP-_-1860010-_-0-_-2-_-9SIAKF3DSX2734-_-Cd+drive-_-cd%7Cdrive-_-8
50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-52x-700mb-cd-r/p/N82E16817507007
If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW's which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.
The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:
$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Latitude-E5420-Laptop-Intel-i3-WiFi-DVD-CDRW-250GB-Win-10-Professional-HDMI/376791632?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=100001344&gclsrc=aw.ds&&adid=22222222228376791632_100001344_153828919326_20723081503&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=679332641651&wl4=pla-2235097983966&wl5=9013636&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=129884431&wl11=online&wl12=376791632_100001344&veh=sem&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_ZhAcoOfd9b3WACPKd_QXPuq3NIZoFnxorRXOK1Xx-CwQz7SO1jSAaAlfhEALw_wcB
You could also write to a CD-R more than once, but you couldn’t truly delete anything (it’d just write to a separate sector on the disc), which would be really frustrating as soon as you could no longer fit your school project on the disc (though, not that it mattered because compatibility of optical media always seemed atrocious anyway… Probably a mix of different versions of PowerPoint or whatever and actual CD compatibility issues).
I agree, but when you introduce someone to math, you don't start with integrals, haha. Thank you though for following up with good info, I almost added some about it, and thought it may make it over the top for an intro
I figured you knew, I just wanted to complain a little haha.
Yeah there was a point after which it became cheaper for the manufacturers to just make read/write drives than produce both.
Fun fact, for a while they would disable the "write" portion. They would sell the same exact drive one for like 99$ that could only read and one for like 199$ that write. Once the techies found out and it started becoming common knowledge they gave up even selling read only drives.
That's not really a junk computer. That's actually a respectable machine, especially if you use a linux distro.
I suppose not everyone had the hardware to cut their own vinyl, so being able to stick the disky thingy in the bleep bloop machine and make your own diskies at home sounded kind of bizarre at first
We had recordable tapes for quite a while beforehand though
We even called our MP3 CD compilations "mix tapes"
As a teenager musician in the 90s, I salivated over the hulking $1k device that could write CDs that lived at the back of the Guitar Center catalog.
Also, the $2.5k Akai MPC for sampling/sequencing.
Now I can do all of this with my phone, but I'm too busy taking a shit before I go to work to stock shelves.
Yeah my mind went right to this. My dad had a few 45s but that had meant paying for a rehearsal space with recording. That was probably the last major medium the average user couldn't make their own
It started with a Tori Amos lyric about someone burning CDs. I couldn’t imagine why you’d destroy valuable property lol. The term was used originally in industry and later adopted for home use.
The first commercially available CD-Rs were produced in 1988.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R
Tori Amos became popular in the 90s. The term burning a CD was in common parlance by 1993. I doubt that Tori is the origin of the phrase.
In 1993, computers were just starting to get CD-ROM drives and CD-Rs were pretty exotic technology. Being able to burn CD's really didn't really go mainstream until the very late 90's.
The Sega MegaCD didn't have any copy protection because people couldn't burn their own CDs yet.
Wait until they find out there's a difference between DVD-R and DVD+R.
Poor DVD-RAM, people don't even include it in jokes anymore.
That was a real niche application though, and came too late. Don't know anybody who actually used it.
Late? It was premiered in 1996 and predated DVD+-RW.
*twitch*
We took a magnifying glass and very carefully burned in the 0s and 1s by hand. /s
Good old
C-x M-c M-ButterflyI'm curious, why link the image instead of linking to the actual website?
Although I realize as I type this that it probably shows as an embed on Lemmy - Kbin shows all images as links
It's an embed on Lemmy. I used XKCD's embed link for that exact reason. And I used the embed syntax (which uses a bang in front of the link markdown)
Yeah but I need that alt text doe
I think it's best to do both
I want to look at the image, not the website. Linking the website just puts more shit in my way.
Skips happened when someone bumped your elbow.
No /s, you literally described a laser imprinting a disc with data.
The back half of millennials might not have burned CDs either.
The iPod came out in 2001, my first car I played music with a cassette-tape to aux converter and a first or second Gen iPod, my second through a USB stick plugged into an aftermarket deck I bought from Walmart. Music downloaded from Limewire.
The cassette to aux converter felt like black magic back then. I left mine in so long that it made a creaking and snapping sound when I finally took it out when getting rid of the car.
I went minidisc of iPod, then a Zune.
I still think both were the best decisions of the time, but apparently no one else did.
But I think it was only like 4-5 minidiscs to get the same capacity as the first iPods.
Removable storage will always be a plus
'95 here. I not only burned disks, but we had one of them fancy schmancy monochrome label burner disk drives. So many MS Word font effects were burned that I'm sure I lost 20 IQ points from the plastic fumes.
Man that sounds so cool
Oooh I remember those
I had a 64 MB Samsung Yepp mp3 player super early. Didn't stop me from burning CDs at all, considering the player could only store about one CD anyway.
I’m barely a millennial and I burned a few CDs. But yeah it was only a few and before I got a tape to aux connector for my car
I was born in 2003 and I burnt my own CD. But I had a geeky dad and quite old hardware
Not sure whether I'm gen Z or millennial, but I definitely burned a lot of CDs. And successfully burned about 20% of them. If even the floor creaked the CD would skip and basically be destroyed.
I may not be the average experience for somebody my age though, considering when I was like 8 I remember using a tape recorder to record my favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette.
Millennial:
Gen Z:
~1995~2013Now don’t forget it, culture wars are important!
I was born in 98, it's just that some people are insistent millennial ends at the year 2000, while others insist on 1996.
I've also heard whether or not you remember 9/11 as the benchmark, and I do, but only barely because I didn't know what was actually happening.
There's also some who say it's whether or not you remember the turn of the millennium, which I don't because I was 2.
The generation borders are just so fuzzy that I'm often tempted to just go with "zillennial," but for some reason people think that's offensive because it "alienates gen Z" or something.
Not only was the definition fuzzy. But it also depends on location with rural areas lagging behind urban.
It’s so Gen Z to feel alienated for that. :p
Same lmao. '02 here. I was handed the family tape player and I once used it to record a song from a YouTube video because I couldn't make the computer record itself. I was 12.
I remember once Limewire became popular it was almost a magic trick to get a clean install of it. Most people I knew had a copy that came with all the toolbars and malware.
When I was a kid I had two radios.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you'd have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
: looks at the world:
: looks back at opa:
I had one radio that did all of this but if I didn't hold a fake adapter into the headphone port at exactly the right angle, nothing worked. I put so much effort into being very still to record songs.
I can hear that clock! Omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm
I had one till the flippers broke.
I'm sure many of us did that. I would use a plug in microphone and put it up to the TV to record cartoon theme songs. I wish i still had that tape.
I just saw a post on Reddit two days ago that said "During the 80s, did kids really just go outside and run wild for hours or is that just in the movies/TV?" and the same feeling hit haha
I remember many years ago when I was going through a box of my burned CDs and games and realized I could just download any of them whenever I wanted. Plus my computer didn't even have a CD/DVD drive any more. End of an era.
I've got a nearly 20 year old cdrom drive that just keeps getting transfered from build to build because you never know. I don't think I've opened in like 3 years... I'm gonna see if it still does real quick.
Ok it does but there was a driver cd for a motherboard I don't own anymore in it.
I keep a Blu ray/DVD burner in a portable enclosure stored away just in case I want to play some of my older games. (I have a smallish retro game collection at this point in a CD rack in my bookshelf, as well as a few boxes copies. if anything it's cool to look at)
Or I need to burn something on the off chance I need to get data off of a really old computer that my grandparents own or something.
I even keep a cd album of turned recovery disk's for various operating systems. I have DVDs for reinstalling windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10, as well as a bunch of Linux live DVDs/CDs just in case. I always try the USB options first, but if they don't work I can always fall back on the CD/DVD. The portable drive guarantees I can use it even on a PC that doesn't have a drive (provided it's not too old - I don't own floppys because I don't have a FD drive)
You had to put it in the toaster while the songs you wanted to record were playing on the radio.
Why burn it when you can spin it on a Dremel until it explodes from centrifugal force?
They do fun things in the microwave too
Could You, please, elaborate? I have a Dremel, and I think I still have a CD lying around.
https://youtu.be/IErdY8GVaMw?si=ZphwZLyyHmbf3mG0
I just bought an external CD/DVD read/write. When I built my most recent PC it didn’t have external bays, and I didn’t even worry about it. Changing my tune.
I have a lot of older games on CD, music files, and movies.
The games I actually own, that can’t be randomly shut off by lack of support. Music files not tied to a streaming service. Movies I can rip and put on my own home media server.
That old tech is still useful. It’s from an age before you “rented” your music, movies (blockbuster notwithstanding), and games.
even he knew
He played the fiddle while ROM burned
It makes me sad to think that I will never say anything this clever in my life.
The software was called Nero with the subtitle Burning ROM.
I may have been too young to understand the reference at the time.
How did it take me until this comment to realize the name was a pun?
He really whips the llamas ass... oh wrong program.
Good ol' WinAmp. I remember rockin' out to all the mp3s I could possibly pirate on WinAmp while chatting to all my friends on ICQ. Now I listen to podcasts on Spotify while yelling at kids to get off my lawn and putting A535 on my aching back.
How did that become a slogan?
Hmm we need a good Winamp slogan, something about music or...
animal abuse! Yeah let's say it beats up llamas like a badass
It comes from these lyrics.
To explain my experience, I need this picture, but with a pirate carrying a copy of him.
The only rule was was to use ALL of the 700mb. I paid for that 800k, you bet your ass I'm gonna use it.
I mean I just bought a cd DVD burner. I have a ton of blank DVD and a blank cd to burn songs for my dad. It is still nice to own a physical copy of something.
The boomer in me still remembers Nero Burning ROM 😬
Lol not like any of us actually know how it works, just push the button and the magic lasers make it happen 😹
Sure mate, none of us looked up what the laser was doing. It's just magic.
Okay okay a select few wizards must have the forbidden laser knowledge
I'm glad I no longer have to be concerned with Nero. But there were many alternatives after a while. This one was my favorite: https://www.imgburn.com/
Do not cite the deep magic to me, Witch.
Might be the only perfect software ever created. It still works. We use at work for burning blurays and DVD for large datasets.
The creater also added tons of hilarious quotes and sass to it.
I used this and CDBurnerXP all the time.
That site hasn’t changed either! Blast from the past. https://www.cdburnerxp.se/
Oooh noooo!
I'm old enough to remember a time before CDs existed.
A time when the height of mobile audio was an 8 track mounted under your three on the tree.
Betamax was the superior format. VHS was cheap crap.
Yes it was, but it was Sony so they locked everyone out of the tech. Paving the way for VHS to win the format war.
What about Video 2000? The audio quality was so much better that when we finally switched to a VHS player I thought there was something wrong with the cable connecting it to the TV.
Never saw that one.
I don't think it was ever available outside of Europe, but it had some major advantages such as a completely bonkers 8 hours run time per tape, perfect still images without distortion, and the ability to reverse or fast forward without the artifacts you'd see on VHS and Betamax.
Betamax was a Sony proprietary format, so they decided to lock everyone else out like morons.
There are people who don't know what a vhs is, and I'm not old and have used multiple. The fuck?
I remember being the first person anyone knew who had a deck to deck burner, it was a Teac, TDK, or a Kenwood, don't remember that well. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time and was bootlegging discs for all of the people in my friends group. Everyone would bring their own spindle of blank discs and we would drink and swap discs until we either went out to go party or until everyone had copies of what they wanted. Eventually I got a few more burner decks to make things quicker, and then I sold off the extra decks to friends before moving away. Not too long after the devices were completely useless as everyone started having a burner built into their PC and just about everyone soon had a PC, still sold my last burner deck for more than I bought it for.
I didn't have a deck to deck, but somehow managed to convince my mom to buy me a bay mounted burner when they very first were hitting stores. There was a local video rental shop, that also rented out PC games for like $2 ea. I copied as many of those suckers as I could convince my parents to rent me over the course of that summer.
It was the program you pirate before pirating a bunch of others.
Alcohol
120%!
Daemon Tools.
CD Burner XP was better, IMO.
Only us nerds were doing it. Most people at the time I'm pretty sure had zero clue where bootlegs came from.
They wanted to be smug about being young
I honestly wasn’t often enough when I was young lol I say let em
we gotta let them create those memories that will wake them up at 2AM somehow
AI is still pretty new. Perhaps not all of them have caught up with it yet.
Don’t forget to hold the CD and candle close to the speaker that’s playing the song. The closer you get, the higher the volume.
Wait, what? Please explain this to me
It's in reference to the title of the post and they're "playing along"
What?
In high-school I used MagicISO to rip DVDs I rented, burned them, and sold them to classmates for $5.
It was a nuisance, with a high failure rate. Recording to tape was kind of fun. Optical not as much.
Remember when Netflix mailed DVDs? We would rip and make copies as soon as the mail was delivered, to try to get them back to the post office before 3pm. I think you could rent 3 or 4 disks at a time?
CD's? HA! When I was young we copied music with hammer and chisel on a stone disc. And that WAS the actual music!
CDs? I remember tapes.
God I used to hate DJ's that would talk up to the post. Used to record all my music from the air from the late night DJ's because they would often just queue up a few songs with no talking.
I was behind a kid in Chipotle last week that had an honest to god Walkman on him with the original headphones. it seemed WAY larger than I remembered.
Because they were doing hookers and blow in the booth.
Or just really shy and didn't get any training about what to say during the breaks (I did a short stint with a small town radio station).
I have an older friend who was a big time DJ in the 80's. He has some stories that'll turn your head. Apparently the industry was very party focused back then.
Upvoted for Chipotle and Walkman's.
I remember giving the joystick port on my C64 a wet willy to activate cheat mode on a game. No, I'm not making that up.
Lmao I had a walkman, and I remember that the less power the batteries had, the slower the tape played. Sometimes I didn't even knew if the song was playing at full speed.
Ah, double decks with high speed copy...
Oh, that was an era.
One of the things I remember most is that cheap, defective or old drives can just fuck up the burning process and now you have a useless disk of plastic you can use as a bad freesbee. I never used the fastest burn option for that reason and still had like 1\40 failed burns 'cause my drive was all cheap, defective and old. With how rarely used they are rn, the price of such failure can grow pretty quick. Some of my relatives in the 00s used them as holiday decorations, wall-mounted them on a string as they are shiny and reflective. Although cringe, it's a little better than just throwing them in a dumpster, I guess.
If you put them in the microwave for a few seconds they get this cool crackle effect on the shiny side. If you've got one of those old "skip repair" doohickeys that buffed it in a radial pattern that's nice too. Keep some plain for a nice contrast.
One can add a baloon of propane too.
I still have one of those repair tools. I bought it just in case but never actually used it. I don't know why I have it still.
Fair warning, as stated above, it just scratches the disc in a uniform way. I never got it to repair a disc.
I have no idea what these "CDs" folks are talking about are.
Excuse me while I pop in my 8-track
Me explaining minidisc to a 20 something cashier at the pawn brokers.
you had a tiny needle and a little hammer, and you would look through a jeweler's loupe to see where to carve in the 1s and the 0s. It was a golden age.
Yeah I'm not gonna lie this is me. I've burned iso's to CDs before but I really not get it. The cds I had could only be burned once and then got write protected and I didn't know how to undo to. I'm just gonna stick with my flash drives
If you ever tried to burn way too many songs to a CD and got frustrated that it didn't work... it's time to stretch your back.
I still get frustrated at this to this day lol
I remember feeling like a wizard when I discovered the MP3 CD format and the 100+ songs you could fit on a single disc.
Sometimes you had to burn them at like 1x instead of like 10x so even the oldest, shittiest players could read them. That was painful .
I used to rip and burn CDs all the time when I was a teenager, and in truth.... I dont know.
I always felt super cool because I had Lightscribe disks
To us people using sharpies... You were basically the Fonz.
it is a lost art now, I still have an unopened box of DVDs... Somewhere.
I have very fond memories setting up the candle and tuning the laser prism just right, following Razor 1911 instructions to set everything up correctly. While trying not to burn a hole in the walls of the house.
That box of dvds is your 99 potions left after beating the game
I remember getting a stack of unburned DVDs as a present.
Same here. And a folder full of CD/DVD backups of old software.
One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they're absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don't think a single disk survived that year.
I also remember when my school got a fancy new "computer lab" that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.
"DON'T OPEN THE DOOR!"
Continues to open the door and snap it shut until the little spring breaks and the door comes off it's rails
Do you mean 5-1/4" ? While 7" did exist they were extremely rare outside of research academia/business and even then fairly rare. The main stream computers like the Apple IIe (in 82' ?) Came with 5-1/5" floppies. The IIe, being an extremely popular public school choice.
8 inch were the old machines - 1970s. 5.25" came in the early '80s
It’s in the name. You just use a match.
I tried that when I was 4 or so. When they said they're burning it, I wanted to try it too.
Gotta make sure it's an RW so you can change up your music every so often!
If you get an mp3 cd player, you can have hundreds of songs on a CD! Hundreds!
The original budget MP3 player: a handful of MP3 CDs.
This is fake because "burning" is a CD specific term, and no real Gen Z would know that you "burn" a CD to put music on it.
Most would probably just assume it works like a USB stick or any regular digital storage format.
It's like how a hilariously large amount of people don't know what the origin of "mixtape" is. They think its just a word that defines music mixes, because no one knows what a cassette player is anymore, or that people actually used to create and sell mixtapes.
Fuck, some of the younger rappers actually put out mixtape cassettes now. There's a fairly brisk but low demand market for not only used tapes, but there's bands releasing them im special editions.
I'm kinda regretting dumping some of my old tapes. I kept the stuff that's impossible to replace (local bands mostly), but I sometimes get nostalgic for the liners. Not the sound being shitty, or how fast tapes wear out, or anything else about the format, but there was something coool about the way the liners unfolded that isn't as satisfying with CDs, or even vinyl.
I'm in a band and we make cassette tapes. They sell like hot cakes. Our last run sold out in a single day on bandcamp. Many people buy them and don't even have cassette players. They're cheap to make and I think many people just want a cool souvenir.
That's the way I think of them now, like the equivalent of a poster or keychain thing.
There are podcasts that were put on vinyls, can you believe it.
I can't say I'm totally surprised, but it isn't something I would have thought of!
I have the hello internet vinyl episode
Sell? I remember it as how to tell if someone fancied you :)
Do kids these days just make playlists and send links?!
1st question, selling mixes tapes was popular in larger cites. The movie Hackers even had a scene with it (although that may have been a CD).
Not sure. "I think" just sending individual song links in Spotify is the thing.
Or the benefits of that sweet chromium oxide cassette tape...
some of us never knew
Image Transcription: Twitter Posts
alyssa, @tamaranians
Maybe its just the generation z in me but how did people burn CDs? Like how did you just get a blank CD and put songs on it?
Friendly Fat Hottie, @TeriAmour
There are people alive that don't know how to burn CDs. I'm fucking old.
Have never burned CDs, but I assume I would take our CD player (which i'm pretty sure has a burning mode), plug it in to my computer, and look up "how to burn CDs"
I see you have no idea how this works...
You need a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW drive in your computer, or externally to write to any of those formats. A DVD-RW can write, or burn (because the laser is literally burning the information onto the disk) to all four formats of disk.
Don't forget the + version of some of those formats.
A reasonable guess!
Some computer CD drives (They were called Burners at the start, but near the end most CD-rom drives would also burn CDs) would do it with software. It would eventually be nearly as easy as copying data to a USB drive.
Chances are you could put in a blank disc and the computer will present a folder as a representation of the disc. Copy whatever into the folder and click the burn button on the top right of the folder
I don't know how film is developed and nobody ever made fun of me for not knowing.
Surprised they even know what a music CD is.
I used CloneCD. It had an icon of a sheep. Because Dolly.
To be frank I am a 30 year old and had to think hard to remember how to burn a cd, and even then. I remember that you just picked the option to burn a cd lol. Remember when you actually needed 2 cd rom drives because images weren't a thing.
They must consult the ancient tomes. Or I guess ask one of us who have.
I still have my old CD holders somewhere.
I never learned to burn CD's cause I had a friend whose dad burned them for us. Not sure if that makes anyone feel old or not.
I still do it, granted I had to get an external CD drive to do so, but still. You put the blank one in and click "Burn CD" in your Zune software, it isn't that hard.
Candle, pfft I put em in the microwave
The sparks mean it's working!
I'm Gen Z and have burned both CDs and DVDs...
I can't believe that some didn't learn it, especially growing up in the 2000s prior to the iPhone/iPad.
The household tower when I was young had 2 CD drives. The actual computer wasn't much, but boy, do I remember all the burning my mom had me do for her peoples
Don't worry, even in Gen Alpha there are some people who know how to burn CDs (in theory), but probably never did, as it is not so widespread now.
So we had special disk drives that basically zapped holes in a CD that played music or stored data. That's why we call it 'burning'
And get this: You didn't burn 4000 CDs. You burned one, sent it up to Sony in New Jersey, they cracked it open and then pushed it again polymer en masse to duplicate the CD. They called this "pressing."
Pressed CDs had holes (or "pits") in them. Burned CDs used the laser to change the color of a dye. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as cool as "zapping holes" in the disc.
I wanna get a DVD/CD Rom drive in my PC, not because I need one because honestly it feels weird not having one
May I introduce you to the concept of punching holes in floppy disks to make them writable?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskettenlocher?wprov=sfti1
Do you even know how to format a 3.5” floppy?
Are you old enough to know what a buffer underrun is?