LGR - CD-ROM Retrospective

I was lucky, my dad got a Gateway 2000 back in '93 and it had a CD drive. It was a real killer system for a few years.

The Teac 72x CD-ROM drive was quite an interesting drive as it split the laser beam into 7 beams to read multiple tracks simultaneously. This meant that it read discs a lot faster that otherwise would require an insane RPM rate.

Seán Byrne

I've still got my Plextor with the "Armored Front Plate". You know, because they "Can spin so fast the disc may explode!". The computer industry was much more entertaining then.

Paul

My first drive was a 1x passed down from my dad's computer when he got a state-of-the-art 2x. I still remember playing Dune 1 and watching the stuttering (because my drive was slow) FMV flying scenes. I didn't care; it was still mind blowing at the time. BTW, <a href="http://cd.textfiles.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://cd.textfiles.com</a> is a great archive of old CD shovelware disks and fun to dig up forgotten software.

The first CD-ROM in my family was a 1x CD-ROM that pushed out completely and was a top loader, back in 1993 i should mention. :) Always copied over stuff from shareware discs trough sneaker net from my dads computer over to my own, until i got my own a year later which was a whopping 3x.

BastetFurry

I remember how exciting those times were, watching fmv from Encyclopaedia Encarta the size of a postage stamp. Looking back, the best use was for the upgraded "talkie" LucasArts games. And Dune... god I loved Dune on CD ROM!

Stuart Marshall

:D My very first CD-ROM game was the SIMS!!! Plus the Hot Date expansion pack and the first Harry Potter pc game

floverSaeu09

My first CD-ROM drive was a Panasonic CR-563 double speed I got in late 1994 for my very first PC build, a Pentium 100; the drive came in a nondescript white box. When I got home and opened the box to take it out I also found this inside - a Sun Moon Star SMS-31083 CD-ROM controller: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/qoeprw4.png" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/qoeprw4.png</a> <a href="http://i.imgur.com/qWdHX1w.png" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://i.imgur.com/qWdHX1w.png</a> Didn't have to use it since I also bought an Aztech Sound Galaxy sound card at the same place and it had the proper connector and drivers for the CR-563; the SMS-31083 was put away and forgotten. I finished assembling the P100 and proceeded to enjoy the living heck out of it until 1996 when I upgraded to a P133, SB16 and 4x Mitsumi ATAPI drive. Good times, good times ^_^ I still have the Mitsumi drive, the Panasonic CR-563 and P100 are long gone though; and while I don't see myself ever using the SMS-31083 controller I'm going to keep it for the time being. It's a wonderful memento of when I built my first PC, and reminds me of a time when working with computers was quite an experience and a lot of fun to boot.

I don't have any specific memories about my first CD-Rom, but the first CD-burner my company got. It was still very expensive (about 2000 DM back then), and oh so senstive. If you just slightly touched the PC it was is while it was burning a CD, you'd get a write error. And those first CD-RW where bloody expensive, think I paid about 15 DM each. Ah, good times, as always, thanks for the memories LGR :)

Jade_of_Arc

i was a few years old when i got into the CD ROM format on my Netram i wonder if the 8bit guy will make video about CD Roms and maybe we should be using the GD Rom as upgrade from the CD due to data get up by MBs like crazy

I got my first cd-rom which was a 2x speed drive when I bought a Sound Blaster Pro 8 bit sound card. Got them for a deal from a pc expo back in 1994 for $150 Aud. First game I bought on CD was Little Big Adventure. Man that thing had some awesome music for the time.

Bryndal Dwyre

My first CD-ROM experience was with pack-in software with my old Packard Bell from 1996 (I was 12-13 years old). It cost us like $2000 and was glorious. I Frankensteined parts out of that PC for years to come. Good times.

Oh those demo-discs on game magazines were amazing back on dial-up.The first PC my family had with a CD drive was this *amazing* (at that time) Toshiba tower. All black with matching peripherals/monitor and a Radio/TV Tuner. Man, that thing was nifty. Windows 95, Myst; Starcraft.

JennaKay

The clips from Computer Chronicles brought back some fond memories. Have you ever considered doing a retrospective of that series?

Will Herrmann

Prepare for lightspeed! No, no, no lightspeed is too slow. Lightspeed too slow? Yes! We're going to have to go right to... LUDICROUS SPEED *gasp* Ludicrous speed? Sir we've never gone that fast before, I don't know if the ship can take it. What's the matter Colonel Sanders? Chicken?

Justin Dotson

Great video !!! now , I go to see is my Sega Saturn CD are fine .... ;)

Yay, a sequel to the floppy disk retrospective! The Oregon Trail game you mentioned along with the Sim City 2000 opening screen brought back lots of memories for me, hehe. Sucks about the whole "your CDs are becoming unreadable in your lifetime" thing, though. :( But at least backing up the CD data is easy to do nowadays!

Lindsay Michelle

I've got a Commodore CDTV with a caddy drive, still works perfectly!

Matthew Scott

heh my first CD drive had a caddy too!

Evan B

I don't know how widespread they were, but I really liked the Night Owl series of shareware CD-ROMs. They not only contained your standard shareware (and shovelware) titles, but also a lot of text files from newsgroups and custom Doom maps and mods. It was basically a snapshot of the early Internet for those who didn't have access to the real thing.

Renzo Thönen

I did that same thing, buying a game before I had the capacity to play it, 'cause I didn't want to miss out on it. For me though, it wasn't a CD. I bought Pokémon Snap for the N64 about 6 months before I actually got an N64! ;)

Kris Asick

my mind was blown when I first put my Civ II CD in my brother's CD player and could listen to the background music :o of course track 1 was the data and sounded awful lol

Peter Metzger

See, that's what I love about the 90's and early 00's. They were so full of nothing but Innovation, all the time. Nowadays, there is little in the way of any real innovation anymore. Woohoo, a new faster Video Card, or CPU. That's great, but also completely expected. Even the recent advances of VR are getting old and more mainstream. I want to see something I have not seen before, and I don't think it's going to happen for a long time.

Zem Hysong

Demo of Rise of the Robots 2?! Damn didn't think they made another episode of the horrific first one!

I still have my old Hitachi 4X drive from the 486SX/25MHz days. It's the one drive I've been able to use to read old CD:s that other, newer and faster drives have refused to even touch. Saved me a CD full of old 640x400 photos back from ye olden days :)

Its very disheartening to come to a damaged CD-ROM, its like losing a baby. :(

SammyToesis

Ahh, the CD-ROM. I will never forget the day, when my dad came home with a Combo-set of a Creative SoundBlaster 16 and a Creative 2X CD-ROM Drive. We installed it in our 386DX-40 and Wow! I was immediately sold. Soon after we upgraded to a 486DX4-100 , and then I could suddenly run a lot of the games that actually came on CD-ROM. The Creative drive died a few years later - so I replaced it with a TEAC 16x drive and later with a TEAC combo DVD-R and CD-ROM drive. The SB16 later got replaced with a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold - mostly because I received a small Midi-keyboard and thus had to get a soundcard that had better support for this. I'm so sad that all this hardware is gone, as I would've loved to have it today.

Martin Ravensholt

Guess I have to re-write this since Patreon's being a pain in the butt today... It's a shame about the lifespan on these discs, especially for us who love to collect old school games like we do. All the more reason that makes me want to back up my older games, though I can only do this when I get my storage server built and going. Though one of the things I really enjoyed about the older games is there's been a lot of sweet artwork on the discs themselves. :)

ReeseRiverson

I got my first single-speed CD-ROM drive on my 486SX/25 back in 1994, alongside Star Wars Rebel Assault and The 7th Guest. It was a glorious day, seeing FMV ripped from Star Wars (while horribly pixelated), being amazed by the opening theme of the 7th Guest, swear at my screen after spending 2 hours on the chess puzzle...

Frederic St-Georges

I remember when I was first reading about them for computer use back in the late 80s. The article said something like, sure it had 640 mb of storage, but who wants to sit there and write a program that big to fill it? Back then, though, getting a game on CD ROM was just the best thing. and the Sierra talking ones were just mind blowing. Sadly, no one today who was brought up on it will really get that thrill.

Gary Leigh

Awesome video. My high school had a four day summer program where you could help fix up a park and then get paid $200 at the end of it. It was crappy work, but at the end, I put all of that money directly into my first cd-burner, burnt my first cd...and then wrote on the front in ballpoint pen, ruining the disc right away. Still, massive improvement from my floppy and zip drive that I had at the time.

Vlaphor

I know that audio CDs, at least in the 80s/early 90s, seemed to have an amazing amount of error correction. I broke a Slayer CD in quarters, taped it together, and it still played.

Jeremy D Pavleck