[blindgeek]

I hated CDs. Too big to be carried in a pocket. Read-only, until CD-R came out. Single use, until CD-RW came out. Required careful handling, to avoid getting fingerprints on the read-side etc. In some ways not unlike vinyl, in its proneness to damage. Lastly, I had terrible luck with CD players and CD drives; they'd wear out after a couple years of heavy use.

For me, CD was a step backward, lacking the robustness and convenience of cassette.

As a medium of information exchange between computers, I can make a similar comparison between the CD and the 3.5-inch floppy. Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.

[airhead969]

Those are nitpicks. The capacity (450x) and speed jumps (20% more at just 1X, to 7 MiB/s at 48X) from floppies to CDs was enormous. Vinyl doesn't have ECC, while most kinds of CD tracks do.

CD-R was partially muti-use if not closed and adding another session.

I never had a CD stand-alone player or computer CD writer or player wear-out. Sony Discman and Plextor burners. I was doing daily, multi-disc (9-10) backups to media and never had a problem. You must've been using cheap drives or unbalanced media at too high of a speed.

[Delk]

> Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.

The use cases where each of those would be more convenient than the other are largely different. The CD had a capacity that you couldn't even begin to approach with any reasonable amount of floppies, and the read or write speeds of floppies would have made handling larger files rather cumbersome even if they had the capacity.

If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD.

[garaetjjte]

>If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD.

Well, later there was DVD-RAM which was essentially random-writable block device DVD. Orignally they even had floppy-like caddies: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/DVD-RAM_...