[lelanthran]

This actually existed; I remember, back in my youth, handling an optical disc for a Sun machine that was packaged the same way that floppies were - within a hard plastic enclosure with a little sliding mechanism that was activated by pushing the package into the slot (exactly the way 3.5" floppies worked).

[rickdeckard]

Yeah, my first CD-ROM drive was like this [1], the enclosure could be opened to place the CD inside.

The drive came with one enclosure, I'm not aware that anyone (including me) ever bothered buying additional enclosures. This surely wasn't helped by the fact that Audio-CD's (with their mechanical trays) were already widespread and produced at large volume without such a cartridge-enclosure...

[1]: https://www.clous.cz/wp-content/gallery/creative-cr-521-c/Cr...

[genewitch]

Also DVD-RAM, when in the writer, had a shell. The single sided ones could be removed from the shell easily and put in a DVD drive (I do not recall if they worked in a regular DVD player)

One of the biggest wastes of money, for me. I got way more use out of my minidisc stuff, which is another optical disc in a case. In fact I still have my net-MD recorder/player, and it works fine.

[devilbunny]

Oh, if only they hadn't jacked up MiniDisc with all the copyright-related stuff. A beautiful replacement for the convenience of cassettes (portability, battery life) with most of the benefits of CD (better sound, can't be eaten by the motors). Unfortunately expensive and never took off in the US.