CD Turns 26 and It Still Won't Die
Posted 08/19/08 at 10:09:55 AM by Chris Moody
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Another birthday for the CD has come and gone and yet the damn things just won’t die. On Aug. 17th, 1982, the Compact Disc was born into an age of rampant consumerism that was the 1980s. Big hair was in, big vinyl and the big snarls of tape from cassettes was out.
The CD of course wasn’t without its drawbacks. They disliked abuse and absolutely had to live in their cases. I replaced the bulk of my CDs with my first car player before going back to cassette so I could dub my own playlists and stop spending money on music I had already bought. Even the players then were delicate. My car CD player touted a 3 second anti-skip buffer for those canyons in the road called potholes. Of course back in east Texas they had washboard roads that could eat up that buffer and just ruin AC/DC’s Who Made Who.
It would be well over a decade later before semi affordable CD-Rs would arrive. Since then everything from music, to photos, to video, to Grandma’s recipes have been stored on CD.
Some really great things came on CD like, Windows 98, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and Starsiege: Tribes. I invested a big chunk of my life in Tribes.
Of course the CD is also responsible for bringing us some really bad things too. Remember Windows Millennium Edition? They should have melted down those CDs before they left the factory. Then there was Mary Schneider’s Yodeling the Classics. That thing should be classified as a method of torture.
Remember when AOL used to spew out those CDs to pimp their dialup service? I use to use them as coasters for my coffee cup. When a new one came into the office, (about every few days it seemed) I’d toss my old AOL coaster and put down the new one.
What do you think some of the best and worse things that have ever been put to CD are?
(Image Credit:flickr.com rodrigo senna)
CDs never die, they just multiply
Submitted by magneticvaportrail on Sat, 08/23/2008 - 10:49pm
There really isn't any reason for them to die. I think the DVD was too ambitious, we could have lived with a double capacity CD, 1.5 gigabyte, it might have been a better combination of size and speed. DVD's in the past, at least in my case, were prone to error making, and were certainly slow.
CD's are still one of the fastest optical medium out there today. And if you need computer code that fills up over 700mb, I'm not sure that is called progress. While I've probably got stacks of DVD coasters, I've probably got less than 10 CD coasters. That's what you get when you buy the cheapest hardware?
DVD's are nice, but we are not seeing 52x DVD read speeds (would your machine catch on fire?). Denser formats are for people with money to burn? Hi-Def and Blue Ray seem to be more of a fashion, although I would not watch a big screen tv without hi-def enabled -- seems to defeat the purpose. Of course that costs more, but I'm straying from the article.
Long live the CD -- the Luke Skywalker of Microsoft? In a galaxy far away, a long time ago......
Back up your terrabyte storage with hard drives, but for communication, nothing can beat a CD sometimes.
Drugs don't hurt, they kill, dreams, families, careers etc. Be all you can be.
best/worst
Submitted by praetor_alpha on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 6:02am
best thing on cd: Starcraft.
worst thing on cd: anything blugrass.
Only if game devs would embrace procedural generation for their content, games could be distributed on cd!
I covered the 3x5' window in my front door w/AOL
Submitted by Wildebeast on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 9:42am
It works kinda like a 1-way mirror, except that it looks like rainbow fish-scales, and the light really shines out the edges of the "scales." From the outside, its a fish-scale mirror. Took to damn long to make, though.
I cut each CD into 3 pieces (otw, it would have taken 200, instead of just 75 or so), and hung them sort of like the beads in a beaded curtain. They move in the breeze, or when I have a fan or the heat running... 8)
Submitted by Queenof1 on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 12:10pm
Didn't someone make a Fish out of the aol CDs?
OMG my mom and aunt have
Submitted by yogurt80 on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 10:17pm
OMG my mom and aunt have sooo many aol fish hanging around.
Submitted by yogurt80 on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 11:58am
Best- The SACD layer. Too bad it didn't pan out.
Worst- low bitrate mp3 filesthat have been re-circulated, recompressed, then re-circulated again.
Submitted by comptech08 on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 8:47am
WINDOWS XP
MAXPC PODCAST (i know you can download it but it still comes with there cd)
Counter-Strike
Journey's Greatest Hits
Drivers
Some Anti-Virus software (rare) :)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater for PS1
Submitted by pellier on Tue, 08/19/2008 - 8:28am
clean out butt crack. I seriously had a friend who did that. It was a maxtor x16 cd-r
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