• _cryptagion [he/him]@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Nah, I’d end up explaining why floppy discs weren’t floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

  • midori matcha@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    “We first had to venture miles deep into the woods to find a local Circuit City, which bountifully bore free trial AOL CDs like fruit. We then grabbed an armful, despite the protests of the clerk, and hastily returned to camp. We then had to build a fire by hand, with kindling and wood, and we donned our robes. As the fire grew, we meditated and chanted around the fire, as we mentally mounted the Serious Sam bootleg install files. It took weeks to and a several acres of wood to chant the correct order of ones and zeroes, so we had to work in teams and take shifts. When it was my turn, I took a CD and stuck it through a metal stick stuck into the fire. I spun the CD with my bare hands, blistered and swollen by fiery praying, and lowered it into the fire to burn the ones, and raised it slightly for the zeroes. Any error found by the final validation step would result in premature cremation by the group. There were not many of us left by the time we had the LAN party. A room full of Pentium 4 PCs made the room feel as hot as a furnace, but the pizzas were cold that day, little ones. So cold…”

  • tenchiken@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    96·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world
      38·
      3 days ago

      “Floppy disks” were 8 inches a side in my youth and went in the minicomputer

      Then along came Newfangled desktop PCs with their 5.25" floppies

      Tom Bombadil remembers first acorn and first rain drop

      • DivineDev@piefed.socialEnglish
        9·
        3 days ago

        I used those big floppy disks with some ancient hardware for running physics experiments during university in like 2015-ish, and I’m sure that exact floppy is still in use today. It’s not even a small and underfunded university or anything.

      • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Fun fact, in some countries the 3.5" floppies were called “stiffy disks”. You know, because the outer casing was “stiff” as opposed to the floppy 5.25" disks. This discovery led to a lot of chuckling among the team I worked with when we opened a new product from one of those countries and read the manual. The instruction to “insert stiffy disk” still leads most of us to chuckling today.

    • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      13·
      3 days ago

      As the owner of a CD burner so old there was no speed to note, and later upgraded to a 4x burner…

      I’m also quite old it seems.

      Edited to add: I bought it at a computer show. The kind that you showed up to in person and paid like $5 to get into. I also bought a used laser 128.

  • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.ch
    16·
    3 days ago

    What I miss most is burning .cue files with hidden tracks; you just don’t get the same high from streaming services.

  • rozodru@lemmy.world
    9·
    2 days ago

    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.

      • rozodru@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        For the DC? yeah, it would play burned CDs no problem.

        For the playstation? not sure. I had mine modded so I could import games from Japan but I don’t believe it could play burned CDs.

        Xbox and the 360 were easy to mod though and you could play burned games on those also.

        But yeah the Dreamcast just did it right out of the box. no mods required.

      • Redkey@programming.dev
        1·
        2 days ago

        The PlayStation 1 had a copy protection system that measured physical properties of the disc which couldn’t be replicated by normal CD writers. There were a few ways to get around this, but to be able to put a burned CD into your console and boot directly from it into the game (as usual) required the installation of a fairly complex mod chip. A lot of people alternatively used the “swap trick”, which is how I used to play my imported original games.

        The DreamCast’s copy protection was heavily reliant on using dual-layer GD-ROM discs rather than regular CDs, even though they look the same to the naked eye. There were other checks in place as well, but simply using GD-ROMs was pretty effective in and of itself.

        Unfortunately, Sega also added support for a thing called “MIL-CD” to the DreamCast. MIL-CD was intended to allow regular music CDs to include interactive multimedia components when played on the console. However, MIL-CD was supported for otherwise completely standard CDs, including burned CDs, and had no copy protection, because Sega wanted to make it as easy as possible for other companies to make MIL-CDs, so the format could spread and hopefully become popular. Someone found a way to “break out” of the MIL-CD system and take over the console to run arbitrary code like a regular, officially released game, and that was the end of DreamCast’s copy protection. People couldn’t just copy an original game disc 1:1 and have it work; some work had to be done on the game to put it on a burned CD and still have it run (sometimes quite a lot of work, actually), but no console modification was needed. Anyone with a DreamCast relased before Sega patched this issue (which seems to be most of them) can simply burn a CD and play it on their console, provided they can get a cracked copy of the game.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I was buying blank DVD’s with printable surfaces, I had an epson inkjet with a tray that would print directly on the disk.

      I would get a shipment of 4 DVD’s from netflix, rip all 4, shrink them down below 4.7G, burn them, print a label on them and put them in a binder. and mail them back out for the next set of 4. The output looked shockingly good. I made it through a spindle or so before i moved on to tversity and stopped dealing with physical media.

      • Slovene@feddit.nl
        4·
        2 days ago

        It was so awesome when I bought a LightScribe dvd burner and could put various decorations on the dvd along with the content label. The novelty wore off quickly though.

        • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          Yeah, I had an external HP light scribe at one point. I bought a single piece of media for it, It just took so long…