[donatj]

I've always wondered, why are CDs a specific ISO file system and not just whatever the intended target can read (FAT32 / HFS(+)) like other media?

Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?

[mikepavone]

> Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?

I think it's sort of the opposite. Read-only/write-once file systems can be simpler because they don't have to be structured in a way that allows things to change. For instance, full file systems generally need to deal with files that are laid out in a non-contiguous manner on the disk since files may change in size after creation.

I think the other aspect is that in the early days of CD-ROM a lot of folks envisioned there would be a lot of use cases that transcended a single operating system so having a universal file system for them was useful. And while some of the grander visions may not have won out, distributing plain data (photos, clip-art, etc.) on CD-ROM was a common use case and benefited from a cross-platform filesystem.

[astrodust]

You're lucky it's standardized at all. Before the ISO specification each and every CD-ROM released had its own format, drivers, and headaches.

[yellowapple]

How many people would've owned CD-ROM drives between 1984 (when CD-ROMs first hit the market) and 1988 (when ISO 9660 was finalized), though?

The bigger pain point for me was around booting from CDs; even though El Torito was around by the time I was potty trained, there were still plenty of PCs out there from before - and it's those PCs on which I cut my teeth as a kid :)

[catiopatio]

I don’t recall that being the case, but my memory could be faulty.

As I recall, the High Sierra Format - which served as the basis for ISO 9660 — was widely used prior to ISO 9660’s standardization and adoption.

[astrodust]

Widely, but not exclusively used. Some big vendors at the time that made things like library indexes and legal references used their own completely wacky in-house formats that required lots of fiddling with device drivers. They'd often only work with a handful of CD-ROM devices as well, meaning you're stuck with your $2000 single-speed top-loading NEC drive for eternity.

High Sierra won out, it was the logocal winner, and there was, thankfully, no standards war like with HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray.

[themerone]

I think it has more to do with the fact that CD-ROMs are an evolution of audio cds.

I suspect the ISO standard was more of a product of the traditional electronics industry than the computer industry.

[somat]

The sgi irix cd's were in their EFS filesystem. It made reading sgi disks on other systems a bit of a challenge.

At one time I was tempted into putting a UFS(the dvd filesystem) format on a flash drive, the theory was it would be a better filesystem than FAT and be readable in any OS. The problem was nobody ever implamented write routines for their UFS implementation, they were all read only. Sort of understandable as the key driver of UFS was a read only medium(the dvd). but it dashed my dreams of using it as a cross platform filesystem.

[TylerE]

Makes me wonder what format DVDRs will see. (yes, I vaguely remember the hell of +R and -R)

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Optical discs can also use the UDF filesystem, and that one can be read/write on other media. There was a moment in history where it looked like Microsoft and Apple were going to both support UDF as a filesystem for USB flash drives, SD cards and so on, but unfortunately that seems to have been scrapped in favour of exFAT, maybe because Microsoft gets licensing fees that way.