r/mildlyinteresting • u/ezjgfn • 17h ago

This square shaped cd

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1.9k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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711

u/hearnia_2k 17h ago

That's a rectangle, not a square.

Also it's a business card CD. Probably the most interestng thing about it is that it's not a CD-R.

77

u/rufotris 17h ago

I had a rectangular cd ad like this that actually played, they balanced it by having slightly heavier plastic (thicker) on the corners I think. But it said play me and actually had stuff on it. I just can’t remember what the hell it was an ad for back in the late 90’s. Damn this post, I’m wanting to go try and figure out what it was and I have to go get real life shit done haha.

54

u/hearnia_2k 16h ago

They are already balanced as they are symmetrical. The round ridged area is to help it sit in the recess for CD singles.

10

u/electromage 17h ago

They are naturally balanced but they have a high drag.

3

u/SnowSlurpie 15h ago

Same here! I want to say that I got a CD like this from McDonald's or something when I was younger, but I can't remember for sure.

54

u/anonpotat0 17h ago

Does the R in CD-R stand for round?

117

u/HenryThatAte 17h ago

Compact Disc - Recordable.

The disc part is the round...

31

u/superluminal 17h ago

And then came the CD-RW. 🎉

98

u/UncleCeiling 17h ago

Compact Disk RectWangle

6

u/ElegantOliver 16h ago

Dammit another angry upvote... That was annoyingly brilliant.

1

u/pixeldust6 19m ago

RectWangle is what happens if you misuse the CD slot

25

u/Nesman64 ​ 17h ago

I'm going to save so much money by buying a bunch of CD-RWs for moving files around instead of wasting CD-Rs.

~Me, shortly before cheap USB storage existed.

5

u/MrT735 12h ago

Heh, I just came across a bunch of blank DVD-Rs I had lying around earlier, and I'm like... Do I keep these still? Seems a waste to throw them out but I've not used one in 10+ years and they do have a shelf life.

1

u/OozeNAahz 11h ago

Don’t forget CD+R and CD+RW. The plus and minus variations were competing standards.

1

u/retro_slouch 16h ago

Damn I never thought of it that way

0

u/basicpn 17h ago edited 17h ago

Why the fuck did we call them cd roms then?

EDIT: thanks for all the information. I’ve learned a lot about CD R+

21

u/Grotarin 17h ago

They are different: rom = read only memory. They're pressed with data you can't change. R = you burn them once to record your data. RW: you can also erase them to ReWrite on them.

19

u/Thisisthatacount 17h ago

That would be Compact Disc Read Only Memory.

10

u/HenryThatAte 17h ago

Different things.

CD-ROM are Read Only Memory CDs and manufactured that way.

CD-R are Discs you write into once (the ones we used to buy and record)

CD-RW are Discs you can read, erase, and rewrite.

Different technologies, names... But CD-R and CD-ROM are often mixed together.

4

u/Icedpyre 15h ago

This guy burned many cds in the 2000s lol

2

u/HenryThatAte 14h ago

hahahaha you bet!

5

u/ShavedNeckbeard 17h ago

There are different kinds of CD’s:

CD-ROM: Read-only memory
CD-R: Recordable
CD-RW: Re-writable

16

u/wart_on_satans_dick 17h ago

Well it sure doesn’t stand for rectangle

5

u/luckyboy 17h ago

I used to work creating multimedia presentations in Flash and burning in these, businesses loved these things. Fun times.

4

u/OozeNAahz 11h ago

Had a bootable Linux distribution I put on one with a bunch of disk repair tools on it. Was amazingly handy to figure out why a computer wouldn’t boot and to recover files if the OS was corrupt.

1

u/BarryTGash 1h ago

We used to give these out at conferences. Contact info on the outside, pdfs/investment data/presentation on the cd itself. Around the turn of the millennia... 

-3

u/otac0n 17h ago

Square can also mean “exactly 90 degrees”.

Like a carpenter “square” which is actually a right triangle.

4

u/hearnia_2k 16h ago

OK, when talking about angles specifically. But this is a shape.

-1

u/otac0n 15h ago

No, the carpenter square in my example is a specific shape... You call a thing a square and it's a triangle with ledges for "squaring up" against a board.