When I was a kid we had a BBC Micro. In university we had CD burners but if you bumped the computer or did anything else while it was burning the CD, the disc was ruined. :P
Oh yes and then right around the time 8x became possible (but cd-r only, cd-rw was still 4x initially I think) someone invented a way to continue after a buffer underrun instead of throwing away the disc. I think that really sold the faster burners because otherwise they were kind of useless for the increased risk of having a buffer underrun skmewhe in the process.
They were expensive coasters back then too! When I was in high school, I spent like $30 (was a ton of money to me back then) on blank CDs (like a 10 pack) only to have them all stolen out of my locker. No idea what the thief would have done with them, as CD burners were not common at all.
I had to kill all extra processes or else the machine (maybe the fault of the HDD) couldn't keep the buffer filled and the write operation would fail.
I made a lot of coasters, but that was my favorite time with computers (1999 or so).