@urheber@discuss.tchncs.de What happened to our youth?????
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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"The 'burn' part is like what the climate change does, which you are familiar with.
The 'CD' part is like your brain, where the 'burn' causes microplastics to melt in a pattern that stores data."
"Now kids, can anyone tell me why the historians often say 'CDs nutz'?"
::Tiny precocious little scamp raises hand::
"Was that an off shoot of the philosopher Welvin's posit on the 'got eem' principle?"
Very good, student. Got em just like yo mamma did
Nero times
This is like Technology Connections having to explain what an MP3 CD is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIR23emsWY
Nah, I'd end up explaining why floppy discs weren't floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.
They were floppy though?
At least 8 inch, and 5.25 inch. 3.5 only on the inside (unless enough force is applied xD).
By 3.5" you ofc mean:
/s
The larger ones were flexible, not floppy—they could be bent without cracking the casing, but wouldn't just bend under their own weight.
"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..."
Me explaining what "Insert Disk 2 of 5" means.
So tellllll me, what's the price to pay.... for glooooooory
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.
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.
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.
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....
Wait we could do this? On playstation you were supposed to change something no?
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.
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.
Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools
CDRWIN creating bad discs if you used a pirated key.
Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn't actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.
This is part of why you could burn "faster", although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.
I am very, very old.
I am very, very old
Good job !
And thanks for the explanation.
"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
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.
Godamn that's cool
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.
Nerd alert!
Godamn that's cool
Godamn that's cool.
I downloaded a 1GB update on my phone today and it took a couple minutes. I spaced out remembering how fucking advanced it felt getting a x2 CD burner.
Then you try to do anything else with that PC while it's writing at 300 KBps and... buffer underrun. So many coasters.
I remember when some company started advertising "BURN-proof" CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened "buffer underrun" to "BURN", and because, you know, "burning" was the entire point of a CD-R drive.
It worked though. Buffer underruns weren't a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.
The last CD-drive I had burned at 52x. I still remember how it sounded like a small jet engine spooling up when the burn started. Amazing how I always got bit perfect burns and how the discs didn't explode while spinning like a car turbocharger.
“What’s a seedy?”
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.
mkisofs . | cdrecord - ?
...and for a while it was fairly normal to refer to writing bootable USB sticks as "burning" as well.
Now I don't say that anymore because I don't want to sound like a boomer, or - worse - I don't want people to take me at my word or think I'm just plain mad.
I always somehow thought the distinction of "burning" a USB thumb drive was adding an MBR or setting something that ordinary file writes don't do.
What I miss most is burning .cue files with hidden tracks; you just don’t get the same high from streaming services.
Still the best no frills digital audio medium.
Even over the mini disc? Blasphemy!
I loved my MDs and Hi-MDs, but they had so many frills. All the frills. That was part of why I loved them!
MD 4 Life
Microwave
postapocalypse looking kinda cozy
Strong Ivan Bilibin vibes (but apparently it's by an another Russian artist, Ernest Lissner).
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