[patcheudor]

>Even if someone were able to obtain an unauthorized copy, a decent CD-ROM drive, sans burning capabilities, still cost in the neighborhood of $600.

I was part of the early CD-ROM days with a Yamaha CD-ROM burner in 1994. It was well over $3000. It wasn't until 1995 that HP introduced a writer for under $1000 at $995. Worse, the early burners didn't have any cache, so to support the Yamaha, I was using a high-end dual-processor Pentium system that was in the neighborhood of $16,000 and I still got plenty of buffer under-runs! On top of all this, the first writeable CD's I purchased were in the $30/each range.

[jonknee]

For those curious, inflation adjusted $3,000 in 1994 is $5,173.99 and the budget $995 HP would be $1,669.23.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[billforsternz]

I don't like the way the results of calculations like this are often presented with absurd levels of precision. So much more sensible to say $5200 and $1700. Arguably $5000 and $2000.

[jonknee]

It's not absurd precision, it's just what happens when you multiply something by a percentage.

[billforsternz]

Whenever you do a calculation, whether it's multiplying by a number and dividing by a hundred (that's all multiplying by a percentage means) or anything else you need to think about what the result means before presenting it. If the result is the amount of money in your bank account after balancing your check account, sure present it to one cent precision. It's a precise, exact number. But the purchasing power of $3000 1994 dollars in 2018 cannot be anything else than a rough approximation, and so it should be presented with appropriate precision. Pretending the number is accurate to one cent is nothing short of ridiculous.

[achairapart]

Also: those cd burners were 1x so it was a whole painful endless hour to burn a single CD-ROM!

[therein]

An epiphany I once had as I was waiting for that endless hour to come to an end was Nero has a logo of the Colosseum on fire. It is a circular structure, like a burning CD and it is on fire because "Nero set Rome on fire".

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Also, the full name was "Nero Burning ROM". It came from a German company, and Rome is spelled Rom in German.

[zokier]

And if we are reminiscing Nero, these track (and others like it) might bring up some memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDWAmgwQvOk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yovnD-yI68U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u39ZqQYOHM

[kayamon]

OMG I just got it after all these years.

[Waterluvian]

I realised all the rest but never that. Thanks for sharing.

[aaaaaaaaaab]

The Colosseum was built after the reign of Nero...

[cgriswald]

...on land depopulated by Nero's fire. So, if the Colosseum as a symbol of Rome and an iconic circle isn't poetic enough for you, there is also the metaphor of destruction/fire leading to creation as in "CD burning."

[aaaaaaaaaab]

While you're technically correct, you're still incorrect.

The area devastated by the Great Fire (allegedly started by Nero) was used to build Nero's Golden House (Domus Aurea) first. After his death, most of the Golden House complex was demolished and it was only then that the infilled artificial lake of the Golden House was chosen as the site for the Colosseum.

[therein]

You learn something new every day. :)

[rootsudo]

Wow.....

[RHSeeger]

To be fair, when the first 2x burners came out, you had to burn at 1x anyways to avoid a buffer underrun and a garbage disk.

[PhasmaFelis]

And you'd better not bump your desk during that time.

[k__]

Burning was a adventure back in the days xD

[MisterTea]

It sure was. I forget what brand my first CD Burner was (wanna say HP) but it was very susceptible to skips from shaking which would ruin the burn (around 98 or so). It was an old house with old floors and old furniture. So the CD burning procedure was to start the burn, gently tip toe out of the office, and close the door. Perhaps it was excessive but ruining a $10-20 cd wasn't exactly a fun thought for a kid on a budget.

[wumms]

In 1997 I upgraded my Yamaha SCSI CDR from 2x to 4x just by soldering out a 0R SMD resistor.

[ct520]

Yeah I remember keeping everyone away from pc to avoid mouse being moved causing a buffer underrun.. windows 311 :-/

[jerrysievert]

I was writing video games back then, and we needed to make frequent drops to our publisher via burned cd-roms and Fedex (thankfully, the airport was nearby, so our late night pushes would make it out).

we were burning on one of those Yamaha burners, but on a Mac instead of a pentium - in our case, we would optimize the external scsi drive that held our game, and still hope we could get a clean burn before the last Fedex drop.

we did manage to find some cheaper cd-r's though, when we bought in bulk.

I still remember buying my own first burner, which was just over $500 at the time, I ended up mostly using it for backups.

anyways, thanks for the memories!

[wazoox]

Amen, been there, done that. At work in 95 I had a high-end PowerMac 9500 with a 2x burner, the disks were in the $15 range each, and I quickly learn to not even move the mouse once the burning process started, or else...

[httpz]

When I first got my CD-RW drive about 15~20 years ago, usb drives wasn't really a thing and the idea of burning CDs were so cool I bought 50 blank CD-R disks. I still haven't used them all to this day..

[foobarian]

I still haven't opened my 100-pack of CD-R blanks I bought on a fire sale at the local Microcenter.

[noonespecial]

Sounds like my setup. That original Yami, Dual Pentium Pro 180, dedicated scsi cache drive, Windows NT4.

Added together with the early MP3 scene on IRC and it was like having a super-power.

[whalesalad]

This reminds me that I thought I could mount a CD burner from one computer in the house as a “network drive” so that I could burn CDs from a different computer. Good times.

[macjohnmcc]

Yeah I remember burning CD-ROMs for a product at Microsoft and the burner being around $5000 and only 2X speed. The CD-ROMs in bulk were around $15 each. Not exactly something most people would have had access to.

[scarface74]

By 1998, when I got my first external CD burner, a parallel port external 2x burner was $400 and discs were relatively cheap.

I was burning on a Gateway Solo laptop with a 200Mhz CPU.