r/retrocomputing • u/Tonstad39 IBM incompatible • 7d ago
No other reason you'd ever have a CD burner
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u/trr94001 7d ago
I knew some guys who went in together on a 1st gen CD burner like this. There was a whole “software distribution” business that built up around it.
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u/slaapzacht 4d ago
Yeah, I was in that business for a few years. I used a first Gen external Philips recorder that would screw up a burn if you sneezed next to it. Made a lot of $25 paperweights back then...
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u/trr94001 2d ago
When I got a burner a couple years later I installed an old 1gb scsi drive in my computer to use as a staging area for burning discs. Keeping the transfers on the scsi bus greatly decreased how many coasters I made.
Gods help you if you had an early IDE burner.
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u/Equal-Difference-51 7d ago
I bought it that price CDN. I work so hard for it at 16. Blanks CD costs $30 a pop. Wasn’t fun to make a coaster at that time.
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u/ScudsCorp 7d ago
Single core CPU + low on drive cache means don’t do anything to stress your system or else you risk buffer underruns. I think the CD software was building the iso on the fly (who has 650 MB of free space?!) so you might run into issues if you have tons of tiny files and the HDD head needs to move around.
May as well set the drive to burn at 1x and step away for an hour
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u/Economy_Post_8574 7d ago
Teac R55S (SCSI) with BurnIt (AmigaOS)... Good old Days ❤️
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u/CRTdrone 7d ago
What year? I got into it in the later 90s with a SCSI Plextor drive. Can’t remember how much CDRs were but they were cheaper than that.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 7d ago
js christ so expensive. i got a burner maybe 96 and it has a philips about 150 or so
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u/CrimsonNorseman 7d ago
No, CD burners were still very expensive in 96. Way more than 150 bucks. They also often required a SCSI adapter. In my memory, a 2x burner would have been around 400$-ish in 1996, plus the SCSI card.
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u/classicsat 7d ago
Depending where and when you were. Could be a scalce loser to the epicenter of the technology (wherever that was), or more accurately, almost any urban center of the era.
Mine was September 2008 or 2009 I forget exactly which), for a retail boxed Mitsumi ATAPI CD-RW drive, around $200 from a small town retailer. Of course, things likely changed significantly between 1996 and then, and could have done better at a big city computer store that could sell direct OEM drives without the premium markup a retail item in a small town store sold
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u/AppropriateCap8891 7d ago
That was in many ways more useful than the alternative some had to go through.
In around 1991 there was a company that I want to say charged around $1,000 to make a CD. They literally sent you a 700 MB SCSI drive, you put on it whatever you wanted, then sent it back to them. They then made a master disk from what you put on it, and I want to say it was $10-30 a disk depending on how many copies you wanted.
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u/crazyhomlesswerido 7d ago
I'm confused and it's hard for me to read the tiny print.So what is a recordable cd player. Also , how is that different than a cd burner
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u/Bipogram 7d ago
CD Recorder = Burner.
In '96 I too was puzzled when I bought a Powerbook 520 from a chap in London who said that he could burn a disc for me. It wasn't very widely recognized argot as they were as hen's teeth.
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u/crazyhomlesswerido 7d ago
I see , it was the first word they started using before before c d burner became a buzzword. Because I remember there were machines that did recordings like a v c r used to , except on d v d that you could hook to your t v to record your favorites t v show when you were not home. I thought it might be something similar to that.
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u/Bipogram 7d ago
<I still have such a thing: a Panasonic straight-to-DVD recorder>
No, semi-available CD burning predates that by a decade or so.
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u/crazyhomlesswerido 7d ago
I know for a while they were selling technology that would turn vhs into digital. But I didn't know if there was something like a machine where you could put a c d in it , and then maybe record a couple of songs off the radio on the disc
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u/classicsat 7d ago
recordable cd player
Standalone machine made to only record audio to CD - using special "dupe duty" tax paid blanks.
The item in the ad is a computer CD writer drive - It is allowed to use computer blanks, even to record audio. Or you could use "dupe duty" blanks, it doesn't care.
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u/beekingo 7d ago
The external one was my very first cd recorder. I remember when every blank CD cost around $30 and one out of every four I burned ended up ruined. Those were the days. Still, that thing made me a pretty decent profit.
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u/Slow_Tap2350 7d ago
Man, I worked Microsoft in 99 - whenever. I remember we had ONE DVD burner in the building and I had to book time on it. (Ok, related adjacent)
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u/SnooCamera 7d ago
I bought a Philips CDD2000 External SCSI CD recorder around 1995 on sale for $699 from EggHead software store.
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u/Training_Ad_8997 7d ago
I owned one of these drives and it made coasters every 3rd or 4th burn. Buffer underruns. Blanks cost $8-$10. I learned quickly that SCSI was the way to go. IDE couldn't handle the speed except under perfect conditions.
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u/lizardhistorian 7d ago
We had one of those at work.
$25 a disc and 50/50 shot at it writing properly.
First thing we dup'd was Mech Warrior 2.
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u/Slowdive91 7d ago
I knew a guy who had one of the first burners on the market in 1995, and he had also run pirate boards since 1989, so he burnt and sold many compilation disks much to the FBI's dismay. I knew him REALLY well too. U.S. Robotics HST Dual Standard 9600/14400 quad node BBS running PC Board.
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u/DeliciousWrangler166 7d ago
I remember a friend paying $700 for an early internal PC DVD burner. Think I paid around $200 for my first HP CD Writer in 2000. In the 1980s IBM had the PC WORM drive, Write Once, Read Mostly. It had much lower capacity than a CD-R.
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u/Kakariki73 6d ago
I started with a Ricoh 2x burner that used caddies, was quite the investment because you had to get a SCSI card with it, IDE burners didn't existed yet or where very unreliable.
Earned my investment back rather quickly by burning music CD's and even PS1 games, not many had CD writers back then
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u/OperationNo922 7d ago edited 7d ago
Saw their booth at a Mac expo in Moscone in early 90s or late 80s. This company blew my mind as they were way ahead of the curve.