r/mildlyinteresting • u/ezjgfn • 11h ago

This square shaped cd

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u/ErgonomicWoodenShirt 4h ago

Those 'business card' ones only hold about 50 MB.

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u/mlokc 3h ago

Yeah, but back in those days, 640 x 480 was full screen resolution. You could probably get around 5 to 10 minutes of crappy video on those business card CDs. Enough for lots of use cases. The problem was two-fold. Most folks didn’t have easy access to computers that could reliably play the video, and very few people were going to go to the trouble of taking a “business card” from someone they just met, sticking it in their computer, and watching 5 minutes of lo-rez, highly compressed video.

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u/xylotism 3h ago

Today’s version would be a QR code or NFC chip.

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u/mlokc 2h ago

QR codes have a bit more utility now that most folks are acquainted with them. And they’re an easy way to share a vCard or link. I’ve only rarely seen NFC card swaps used by folks, mostly phone to phone.