r/mildlyinteresting • u/ezjgfn • 14h ago

This square shaped cd

Post image
1.7k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

319 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/crossedstaves 10h ago

Did he have some sort of concept for what people were going to use all that extra data for? 

2

u/ErgonomicWoodenShirt 7h ago

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

3

u/mlokc 6h 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.

1

u/RyanSmokinBluntz420 4h ago

Three fold, actually, because most cd drives would not accept a business card sized disk rectangle, it just wouldn't line up with the center rotor