Before CD ROMs, there was… microfilm. In 1988 I worked for a company called Imnet that was trying to build a business around scanning and storing insurance and banking records for later retrieval. They built a washing machine sized robotic microfilm reader. It stored hundreds of rolls of microfilm that could be robotically loaded on demand, film forwarded to the correct frame, scanned and made available to a server. In 8 seconds!
These type of databases were often used in conjunction with microfilm. The database was for finding what you needed, but the actual thing would be stored on microfilm. When I did my undergrad not all journals were digital yet (at least not fully), so I sometimes used databases like this (off a network, not CD-ROM) but needed to get the actual article text from microfilm.
I kinda loved the haptics of going through archived newspapers on microfilm. It was definitely not very convenient when doing research about historical events, but it was .. somehow more tangible than just using Google.
I worked for a utility in the early/mid nineties. Optical storage was used in the stead of microfiche. they produced tens off thousands of sheets of microfiche. I once had to re-index the microfiche by hand. I can still feel the cuts on my hands from handling it. Death by a thousand cuts.
I work for a marketing company, we just moved office we were cleaning out the storeroom and there were no joke thousands of CDs of stock photos and clip art and fonts.
From my experience with the Pioneer machines they were meant to be used with Macintosh. There were Extensions that let you change the disc being accessed by the finder and did not create confusion by pretending to have all your discs available at once. The Mac software was so much more well thought out and the windows software felt like an afterthought. I had the 18 disc version and it was a wonderful way to organise mac games and general data. I found it all in the thrift shop in a small town in British Colombia along with a grey PowerMac (model escapes me, one of the ones in the larger horizontal desktop cases which sat horizontally and was grey from before they changed their design language.) The changer came with the cartridges and worked flawlesslessly. If my collection hadn't been stolen I would post pictures.
Those huge linear actuator coils were to reduce skips caused by vibration. This is before the overspin got crazy enough to just try again when the disk came back around. The transport lock was to prevent shipping damage, or damage from mobile use. No, the did not work in a moving truck, but they were used in some mobile applications such as oil drilling rigs and oil exploration rigs (i.e. thumper trucks). These rigs had custom integration that did things like suspend the os and park the hard disk if you took it out of park or released the parking brake (or powered up the thumper engine). You could the drive and resume operation without having to do a full boot and load of applications. Early thumper trucks would record the seismic data to analog tape, which would be digitized and analyzed before moving the truck to the next site. These were specialized devices so every little niche you could cover could mean a huge increase in your potential market.
When doing a basement evacuation from a friend to rescue a bunch of classic computers, I've found his old SCSI CD tower. This CD tower was used by a popular Amiga piracy BBS in Western Europe; they had one burner, and storing the BBS's data archive on burned CDs was a lot more convenient for bulk storage than contemporary hard drives.
Yeah these massive CD library systems were a big hit with BBS guys for the short time period between their existence and the BBS scene falling apart in the wake of internet access. Some bragged about how many CDs full of data they had active to entice guests, especially the ones that went semi-pro and started charging for extra access!
@@paulluce2557 Many discs from the 80's are already unreadable. That's about right though, even a little better than predicted. Tapes seem to still be the most stable/reliable and easy to duplicate if offline backup is mandated. (Tapes though, man I hate tapes) The last place I worked we had tech from the 70's-modern day. We were required to have offline daily backup of slot machine/lottery pays/wins/losses. We even still had an IBM big iron with a reel to reel modified for modern tapes. It was stupid, we used it to print out logistics data for operations.
Unfortunately my dad, a work from home lawyer, has not got the old westlaw CDs anymore. They aren't super secret. They aren't required to return or anything. They were just completely superseded by the online version that became free through the local bar association, and so the CDs became trash. They're all 5 to 15 years deep in landfills by now is the most likely fate of most CDs like this, honestly.
I was that weird kid in middle school (7/8th grade in 1997/8) that hung out with the IT admin. The whole school (district actually) ran Mac OS and they used several CD server towers to share various CDs. The “computer lab” had its own tower, the teachers their own, and there was a public one. Each were a full sized tower case with 6 or 7, or more individual CD drives. They didn’t use a multi changer like the Nakamichi at all. Each disc was in its own drive and I don’t ever recall there being an access issue. I don’t know if each tower had its own sever but I do recall each tower was served over different AppleTalk zones. Lovely video as always ❤
Same -- cut my teeth working for my school system. We had a few of these towers on the network and would drop in the discs we'd need for the day. Main downside was if more than one client was pulling from a CD share it'd seriously slow down -- so in practice each tech would have "their" tower. So a little picky, but it was a major efficiency gain. Instead of sitting at a PC juggling discs we could roll a script, start it on a machine and prep the next ones (e.g. blow out the dust, do whatever wasn't scripted, etc)
God appletalk was so good. I don't know how well it worked at scale but it's certainly been the easiest of era network solution for filesharing I've ever used. Even in modern systems. I'm actually looking to include appletalk on my file server for my friends and I classic macs so we can share programs!
Yeah, I think one thing missing from this discussion is just how bad it is to have multiple users trying to read from the _same_ CD. Seek times for optical media were not good, so if it had to seek between two places on a disc, it was nearly as bad as the disc changer thrashing problem.
There are two kinds of computer nerds: the ones that hung out with their school IT admin, and the ones that the school IT admin despised. I was the latter 😈
20:45 - Can confirm - my first job was in 1992 as an intern at the company my dad was an IT manager for. A large national company with dozens of offices. They were upgrading all their Macs to System 7. They had a site license for it, but Apple only shipped one set of floppy disks. My job was to make copies of the install disks so that each office had two full sets. The funny part was that the fastest computer in the office was the only one with dual floppy drives (a Macintosh IIfx) so that's what I was given to use. I really quickly discovered the Disk Copy utility had an "image disk" and "write image to disk" functions (that apparently none of the actual IT employees knew about) so the second drive became irrelevant quickly. (Since System 7 wasn't multitasking, it could only read or write one disk at a time. Dual drives were because in theory it would read from one as it wrote to the second; but with imaging, that was moot.)
For me, the absolute killer app for CDRom was Public Domain (PD) software libraries. In one fell swoop, instead of paying $1.27 plus P&P for a single diskette. I could spend $32 and get everything they got on a couple of CDs. Mind blowing.
Ah, shovelware, the soulless digital exploitation of the 90s! ;) But, although many people call it soulless, it was without sarcasm so much better than the present soulless exploitation of Internet users. They couldn't pry into users data and they had no way to squeeze gameplayes for money. Especially considering the latter factor, I feel the ratio of good software to bad was about the same as you'd find in a modern app store. I also had a better time with shovelware than with GNU/Linux in the following decade. GNU philosophy and propaganda effectively marginalized programmers who took pride in producing a good product.
@@eekee6034 well that was a bit of an odd tangent heh. Anyway, those shovelware discs were like $5. You knew what you were getting for the most part. There was nothing particularly exploitive about it other than some profit made on other's work but there was some value in the disc existing at all. Lots of fun little games and stuff.
I wish there was a 1PB CD-ROM , imagine a copy of the GPT model in your home computer for your queries without any spying or "you can't ask that", all running locally in your GPU, well if your GPU could just use normal DDR5 memory without being that expensive (nvidia is robbing everyone by selling memory more expensive than what it really is) That would be a killer feature for a new bigger CD-ROM nowadays.
Around 1996, my university had IEEE magazines archive in 10s of CDs. The archive contained OCRed copies of the actual paper magazines! It was amazing back then as students and researches didn't have to use microfilm/microfiche or flip through paper magazines. The IEEE archive were installed on two computers in the library, where each computer had its own set of CDs in an interchangeable SCSI jukebox.
I owe my career to my Dad's MSDN collection. Every OS, App, and Dev tool Microsoft made with quarterly updates. I'd bet not many other teenagers had win 2k and visual studio 6 on their Compaq. Having a CD changer like the cassette version would have been great considering how many times I blew up the install.
I worked at a law library for a while. I’ve seen a lot of westlaw disks but mostly because they get separated from their parent book or set and tossed in a box and put away with the microfiche and data tapes. Any library with a decent budget has by now thrown all of those away, mine didn’t because we had too much to do and not enough staff.
One cottage industry taking off around that time was home machine embroidery. My mom sold software and machines as well as gave lessons. Those click art CDs are a literal gold mine for that type of thing. Back then the digitizing software was at least 2,000 USD if not 10,000, and it was like tracing a bitmap file to a vector one miniscule line segment at a time. Over time they did get better with fill effects, for automatic flocking or whatever they do. Anyway, being able to browse the illustration files, because line art could very early on be auto-traced to varying degrees of success, pick a cool animal and then have it on a shirt pocket. Wild.
I actually was that guy who got sick and tired of disc swapping with a single CD ROM drive, but I solved my issue with a double bay sized, 5 or 6-disc unit that I'm pretty sure LGR did a video on. Riven was absolutely the catalyst for this, but I was also really into a game called Timelapse which I think came on 4 or 5 discs. I really was of the assumption that multi-disc games were the wave of the future, and I don't know if I could have been any more wrong!😂
One really big use case for the CD-ROM jukebox drives was BBS sysops. If your BBS listing can brag that you have 1+GB downloadable wares, that puts you in a pretty big disk energy kind of mood in ~1992. It would draw callers in from out of state, if you really went to town with the idea. There were large multi-line boards that had numerous CDROM collections available for leeching. I think they experimented with membership fees at one point. Anyway, jukebox tech was big with sysops.
Absolutely. On one BBS I remember having to wait for the CD changer to change before I could access the various file areas that were associated with each disc. I remember it presenting the various Night Owl shareware discs on a menu.
In the early 90's we setup a 6 line bbs with 6 computers networked together that each had two cdrom drives that ran at 2x speed. 12x cd drives total and it used a $900 diskdrive that was a HUGE 1000MB to hold the searchable index. Lasted about 2 years until dialup internet changed the landscape.
Way way back when (1993/94) I created CD-ROMs with encrypted patient data to send to hospitals. This allowed each hospital to have basic records for each patient and then request more records overnight over the network. This completely filled a CD-ROM.
This was still a thing in 2014. Mostly to send imaging (MRI, etc) to small offices/clinics. We were still ordering Dell machines with Windows10 for the diagnostic stations that had DVD/CD writers so these discs could be made. Everyone else was pulling the data over internet once things like Epic CareEverywhere became a standard thing in the late 2010's for cross clinic data sharing. (The place I worked at the time was one of the first ones to fully implement this, and it was like 2016, CDs and fax before that!)
@@slightlyevolvedyeah I remember being given a burned CD with X-ray and MRI results in 2011. To take to my doctor back home or something. I was kind of annoyed they weren’t just high res pictures I could look at, it was all obfuscated.
Hey, that DVD changer looks like a prototype version of the Kaleidascape! I worked for an AV company starting in 2012 and these were very popular with movie buffs who wanted huge libraries. It used to let you rip your discs as ISOs and store them on a hard drive, but they got sued over it, so for legal reasons they started selling these giant disc carousels so you could just leave all the discs inserted, then pick a movie you wanted to watch and it would play that disc. They had Blu-ray versions too, but it's basically the exact same thing - a giant 200-disc carousel that spun and would store your movies. Like the one you showed, you could daisy-chain them together and have up to like 1000 discs on a single unit's main page. And like your unit, it was a slot loader, one disc at a time. We'd have interns sitting there loading discs for hours for the customers 🤣 But also you could take the lid off and just manually insert the discs. It would still need to re-scan but you save time on sticking them in the slot that way. Kaleidascape was a lot more refined, and had HDMI/component/composite outputs on the back, no computer needed. You'd just plug it into your TV and could use a remote to select the movie you wanted to watch. In other words, the PowerFile walked so Kaleidascape could run😩
Holy crap, doing UA-cam full time must've really helped with getting projects done, wasn't expecting an HOUR long video so soon! Thank you so much for your incredible work!
Always funny to see younger generations talk about what I lived. I was a BBS SysOp. We used these extensively for our users to download shareware. Shareware CDs were published and we would use these to store all those files. Games, apps, whatever was put on volumes that we had software that knew where these files were and would switch to that CD and allow the user to download it. Wildcat BBS and some door software often was some of the ways we made all this work. I think BBS operators were some of the biggest consumers of these devices.
I have seen one of these in the real world, and the process of scheduling access and limiting thrashing was solved by people sending emails back and forth asking for time to use the library during dedicated time slots. When these were scheduled, you would get about an hour with the whole system entirely to yourself. If someone else tired to access it at the same time, yes, thrashing would occur but usually the person who was scheduled would very quickly locate the person who was causing the interference and go yell at them. It was a small-ish design firm of about 30 people, and they were using it with a large collection of stock media, fonts, and textures that could be applied to 3D models. They had a big library that could store 500 CDs, and they were still using it as late as 2010 because "What we have works, darn it, we're not upgrading".
@@fordesponja I remember many days just hiding in the corner with my computer switched off, because people constantly tried to blame me for their 'hacking' (thrashing) the disc server to get out of doing their assignments; Hoping that eventually when the (competent) admin would come to yell at me -and- they'd notice that I was literally doing nothing - instead of the 'student' pausing their mischief when I was forced to leave the room. It took _months_ but if the admin was furious enough when he came with the vice-principal to expel me to actually verify that the computer was cold, (and that I hadn't switched the machine off to avoid being caught while runners continued to tell 'on me' for the active thrashing.) Then I do not have the words to describe the absolute warpath he went on to see the trouble makers punished. In the remaining years I was at that school not only did I _never_ see another 'assistant'/junior IT staff again, and the remaining staff reminded students not to mention them where the admin may hear. -- But two schools later the librarian/online-CD-collection-admin had heard some version about what happened, and 'gently' handed me discs for the first year to make certain that (CD) resource collisions couldn't be used to hold me back. ( And the 'students' that enabled them to avoid doing the jobs they'd been paid to were told that it wasn't always me - Though I was not allowed to hide during computer classes anymore. )
The timing on this is amusing for me. I work for a company that specializes in uploading data off old storage mediums to the cloud. Just recently we've been asked to quote on a job to process and upload 125'000 CD-ROM's. So I have been looking into CD Jukeboxes like this and whether we can we repurpose them for our needs. We've also just taken delivery of an IBM TS3500 Tape Library into our offices that we're planning to use for automating ingest of LTO and IBM 3592 tapes.
As you were explaining the massive amounts of storage a CD-ROM gave you at the time, I just kept hearing the lady from “300MB” in my head… and then you played a clip of her!
In the early 2000s working at an MSP we had quite a few customers using CD-Rs for backups. They'd purchase a spool of 100 discs and swap out a disc every morning, storing the old one in a different spool after writing the date on the label. We even had a few cycle through a spool of CD-RWs too. I kind of miss those days - months worth of air-gapped easily recoverable backups.
We used five, five disk changers for our Mitchell automotive reference library in the mid 1990s until the early 2000s when it was transitioned to online databases. Every year we would get three or four disk to update and every couple if years the entire library was changed out. It beat pulling books out, but was really a pretty silly and extremely clunky system
@@kwisin1337 Even though I was alldata certified, in most shops I never used it much. Though mitchell on demand typically worked good enough, and some fancy shops had identifix (tech info). But the old mitchell on disc was a headache.
@@kwisin1337 I actually used both for some time. They both had thier up and down sides, at least at the time. I've been out of the industry since 2015, and I'm sure it's changed a bit. From 1993, when we acquired the system, until we went completely online, with faster internet and computers, I moatly used the computer for refrences after 1992, the last library we had updated. It was usually much quicker to pull a book off the shelf than to wait for a changer and a 66Mhz DX2 😆 There was a slight novelty to the disc system though. The more I think about it, the more I remember no really caring for it too much.
I worked for an airline, and we had repair records older than 5 years on CD, and used one of these systems, but it didn't have any scheduling, as there were only a few people that would ever need to access them. Even older repairs were on microfilm. I think I only ever had to look at the microfilm twice in ten years. Also, while I was there the engineering library went from a dozen bookshelves to a file on a server. This was all in the 2010's.
As late as 2004 (and probably beyond) Dell was scanning every single document to CDs/DVD’s. There was a room dedicated to it at Round Rock 1 with a constant green glow and burning drives It an extremely surreal, all white room with shelves lining the walls all filled with plastic circles. It was like you’d walked into a room on a flying saucer
I interned in the I.T. department at a large retailer's home office. They had a CD library server with (I think) 90 CD drives in it. It was the size of a chest freezer. Hardly anyone was allowed to physically touch the thing. I know I accessed it a few times, mainly to remotely install software (usually Microsoft Office) onto new workstation builds. It was just another server in the network tree, and each drive looked like a folder. This was in the 90s, a (mostly) NT 4.0 enironment.
Your presentation style is amazing. Somehow it cuts straight through my ADHD and focuses me right in on the content even with how long and exhaustively considered every video is. Thank you
Probably because he knows firsthand what it’s like! In fact his blog post/website article about ADHD is what got me started on the path of realising I also had it. I bet if any sections get too long or prop-less he reworks them.
@@kaitlyn__L You "realised" you had it, did that work for getting you the "kiddie crank"? If it did then I'm off to the store! I will "realise" I have many ailments!
@@james-faulkner thanks for your very mature reaction to a brief summation of years of research, introspection, and indeed discussion with medical staff. I also appreciate your playing-into the decades-old trope about drugseeking. Even though Gravis’ article discusses how many meds don’t work for many people and how you need to develop other coping mechanisms and workarounds too. You’re an extremely original thinker, a true intellectual maverick
@@kaitlyn__L Ahh the poor little Gen Z got their feelings hurt. ADHD was invented so we X'rs could drug our kids and get them to shut up. Just be glad you aren't like the majority of the population and self-medicate, you will always have your supply now that you are addicted and I presume convinced that your inability to pay attention is some how related to your developmental retardation. Oh that's right can't say that either, now we say "on the spectrum". My ex-wife put my kid on that crap and what a weirdo he turned into. It had nothing to do with genetics Believe me! Vote Blue! Really, vote blue! (if you are old enough)
The Toronto Reference Library used to have a bunch of these CD-ROM databases. You couldn't check them out, or even take them out of a specific area of the library (because as you said they probably cost a fortune), but you could browse them there, and copy what you needed to something else or print it. I remember using them for a project in high school.
Yep. I mentioned on an old Twitter thread that a BBS could swap discs unattended, copy the requested file to a hard drive temporarily, and let the user download the file while other users download stuff from other discs. It's conceptually very similar to mainframe tape robots.
Another popular module was the Axis Storpoint CD. It was a SCSI-to-Ethernet server that allowed CDROM libraries to be accessed by SMB, NFS or HTTP. It's a 5.25 module that would be compatible with your SCSI Express Tower and would fit in the 8th drive bay. Back when I was in public school, we had one of those CDROM Jukebox Servers with a Storpoint module and it attached to the School's Netware network
Definitely implemented on Novell servers for education / schools back in those days. (Back when I was in school) There were numerous advantages. Firstly, if the discs were given out to teachers, that meant they could easily be stolen or lost. Secondly, they had to have many copies because a lot of the teachers wanted them. As mentioned in the video it was a copious amount of data / knowledge - way bigger than hard drives of the time. Having it available across the whole school was liberating. Students didn't need to always go to the library to research something from World Book Encyclopedia or Encarta (World Book had way better text, while Encarta had more multimedia like videos and audio) The mild inconvenience of a changer swap was literally no sweat at the time. Besides most had dedicated drives and didn't have changer tech. I think changers were more for archival where you literally rarely accessed the data.
As someone who knew someone *ahem* that rented all 10 seasons of the Simpsons from Blockbuster, a season a weekend and then laboriously ripped with DVD Decrypter and converted them to mp4, the Powerfile with the burner would have been amazing (in a hellish way). Oh thing the things we did before streaming.
The mechanism in the first Pioneer makes a lot of sense if you think about how much would have cost them to spin up a new production line for a niche product with uncertain future instead of just using the one they were already making for the car changers.
@@steverogers8163plus the magazine specifically bragged it was more durable than the home music changer, so I’m sure they could’ve used smaller motors but just chose not to
@@steverogers8163 Yeah that was what came to my mind also immediately. This is way over build, who needs that much vibratio.... right Pioneer was into car CD changers for high end luxury cars. So they probably just took their car changer carriage system and packaged it in a box for enterprise use. On top of that they could boldly claim "heavy duty, reliable mechanism" since it was literally build to take road bumps and keep the reader going. Hence the massive linear motor rails and so on. Meant to hold the read head in place against a surprising number of newtons of force. As said also... once they had the robust mechanism, it was just cheaper to keep the production line running and put it in everything, than make separate weaker model. Also it's Pioneer.... they never were exactly a cheap botton bargain brand. So they could justify the price, even if some bean counter went "well if we made gazillion of the cheaper ones, the cost per mechanism would be cheaper" and execs probably went "or we can just sell this one with bigger cost per mechanism and price accordingly, our target customers can afford it".
That's what I also wanted to add, somewhat. The changer cartridge looks exactly like those of car stereos, where you had a changer in the back of the car. So my guess would have been as well that the mechanism is simply from a car changer that actually needs to withstand a lot more than a stationary unit.
I've been following you since you were filming in your basement and you've always been a great storyteller but this one is on a whole other level, fantastic video
What a nice trip down memory lane. Somewhere in 1997 I bought a product called D-Sat - a collection of satellite images of Germany on 11 CDs. As a geology student at that time it was incredibly useful. My PC back then was a trusty old K6-2 with at least 3 hard drives amounting to about 1.5 GB of local storage. Google Maps was still 1.5 decades away and the disk swaps were tedious. I certainly had no money to spend on multiple CD Drives or even disk changers. Thank you for your work on your videos and your channel. I've been a long time fan and subscriber so please continue your great work. Regards.
Pioneer also made a 700-disc library with up to sixteen drives called the DRM-7000. It could be equipped with either CD or DVD drives with recording capability, and had a standalone 20-disc magazine changer in the top.
@@TheAechBombHow much do you think this thing cost in today's $? I don't think it was sold @ Best Buy, and maybe if you could afford it then $2-$3k WOULD be considered a "little extra cost", but my guess is it went for like $30-$35,000 USD in today $ (or $16-$20k in 1999)? Does anyone know?
I had 5 PowerFile C200 units that were retired from a TV station in 2007, and they worked great using a Linux system back then. They saved me tons of time copying my DVD collection to my home theater PC... 😊
I use to work for a company that produced COLD archival software. The main client base was the finance and banking sector. We recommended MO jukeboxes (then later UDO) for the storage. I was on the front lines of the MO to UDO upgrades. Unfortunately, the UDO media was not backward compatible with MO drives. When upgrading customers from MO to UDO drives we basically copied all the data from the existing MO disks to new UDO disks (typically multiple 1-4GB MO disk copied to 30GB UDO disks) while generating extensive auditing logs to maintain chain of authenticity with the original document. The MO disks would then be stored in a cupboard with a single standalone MO drive attached to the server for access if ever needed. Thanks for a nice trip down memory lane.
Thanks especially for the shot of the Borland manuals. My dad had their compiler suite and I remember all those books sitting around, which I futilely tried to learn to program from (I ended up years later learning from UA-cam and Stack Overflow).
Gravis, THANK YOU for article on ADHD on your website. It seriously changed my life, it changed my position on how I look at myself and my life. Thank you 🙏
You’d probably enjoy looking into the behind the scenes at the British Library (and really any other mega/deposit library). The BL has a ton of robots that retrieve books (or really crates of books for humans to pull the actual item from). Readers can get large amounts of the microfilms, books, newspapers and other physical items in the collection in ~70 mins from a request.
I was expecting it since the last video with you talking about listening to your entire music library without switching a disc, and there it finally is, it's the disc donut! Before my dad finally converted to a media server the centerpiece of our home media center was a slowly growing array of CD, DVD and eventually Blu-Ray donut disc changers. They were actually very different to the one you showed off, less features, one less reader and no burner, no data disc format was supported at all since they just plugged into the TV and ran their own firmware. That firmware did come with it's own level of jank, but unlike windows drivers they actually worked, and were nearly perfect for someone who amassed a wall to wall DVD collection. I say nearly because most of those machines had no clue what was put inside until you told it, which for a large collection all going in at once results in spending a large chunk of your weekend playing each disc, waiting through unskippable ads until you figured out what movie it was, and then ejecting the disc back into the donut so you could add it's name onto the list, thank god they had a PS/2 port for a keyboard.
That DOS program layout at 18:43 reflects how academic results display today when you search databases like Gale, Ebsco, etc. That is wild how they have standardized things.
Gravis, THANK YOU for an article on your website about ADHD. Ive read (and listened to) it dozens of times in this and last year, and IT inspired me to go to a clinic, and get diagnosed. I'm in my 30s and whole my life struggled with ADHD related problems. THANK YOU! P.S. Never have been so early!
It was instrumental in these last 2 years, bc of the war there were a lot of the stress on my nerves. And attending group therapy on coping with ADHD symptoms helped a lot.
My uncle had a an AV install business around the Seattle area. So my grandpa always had the good stuff. He had one of those 300 disc DVD carousal. The remote control was an HP tablet with winxp. It wasnt a great set up, but about that time we were laboriously converting all of the dvds to files with a cracked DIVX encoder. good times
We had one of those Asaki DVD writer robots at work! It had six DVD burners all controlled with FCAL/fo, and held something in excess of 1000 cdroms! It was the backend archiving unit for a broadcast music video library, all controlled by a front porch digital assets management system, that also controlled a Sony Petasite.
I went down the Sound Ideas rabbit hole a few years ago. I was revisiting one of my all time favorite albums, _Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness_ by The Smashing Pumpkins. There's a song on that album called, "Where The Boys Fear To Tread," that sampled a sound effect I recognized immediately as the rocket explosion in Doom. After a few minutes research, I figured out that Doom took it from that sound library and so SP was actually sampling that, not Doom.
You're right about the sound effect, but you're wrong about the licensing. I just pulled my copy of Mellon Collie off the shelf, and the liner notes say "Explosion from DOOM courtesy of id Software, Inc. and Bobby Prince Music." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I used these. And built (my own) of these. SCSI mainly. And normally CDRW drives. In case anyone now thinks they would like to have their dozen data CDROMs available instantly, you can now make virtual CDROM "stacks" of five, 10, 50, etc., CDROMs which you rip to .ISO and share over a Linux/BSD server. Which is what I used to do the minute it became possible. :) Loved this video. You covered pretty much everything about my CDROM revolution.
I remember that BBS Magazine would have ads for CD rom collections of shareware for Sysops to host content on their BBS's for download. There was even a satellite data service at some point advertised.
DUDE... this video MADE MY DAY!! Thanks you for this. I was born in 1985 and remember those COREL collections, friends of my parents had a design studio and had those around. THANKS for this!
I have always liked these things, and have a 604X here, so it's nice to see these things covered. Pioneer lasers from that period do tend to fall out - I had exactly the same situation last month. Cleaned everything up, bit of superglue on the side, popped it back in - works fine. Of course, any glue on the lens and it would be game over, but with nothing to lose it's definitely worth a try.
That's good news, I don't think I have quite the patience to try and fix it myself but it does mean I'm more likely to find someone I can ship it to who's going to put in the effort to give this thing another chance. Thanks!
Replacing the laser pickup assembly isn't a huge job. Every one of these lasers will eventually give out, but Pioneer only used a few different variations.
Loved the video. You've gotta be one of the most interesting people to watch on youtube imo. Covering cool stuff, giving it the screentime it deserves, yet keeping me engaged throughout. Very rare a UA-cam video gets moved from the secondary monitor for background noise to my main screen these days, but this did it for me. Thank you for the entertainment and education
One underrated but essential aspect of your videos that deserves more praise is how good you are at making we the viewer empathize with the hypothetical consumers of the time in a given scenario. You could've just told us businesses need access to lots of data and moved on, for example, but instead you gave the situational context so that we could really step into the shoes of the target consumer at the time, and fully get just why this would be such a big deal to them. And I think that kind of thing really makes your videos stand out among others. 💯
Sound ideas in the thumbnail got me so excited. I bought some Hollywood edge libraries (now owned by sound ideas) used on eBay and they came in caddies, little sliding door and everything. I meticulously took them out one at a time to rip them. The booklet even had handwritten bug notes from a chess game stuffed inside. I also own the General 6000 and I’m pretty sure they’re just normal CD audio discs. I ripped them with Adobe audition no problem, I never tried to access the files directly. That being said, the modern documentation for it mentions specific wav files, some of which are broken down as multiple CD tracks on the original discs.
We used the General 6000 in the campus radio station (in the early 00s) for making promos, sweepers, jingles, and so on. It was massive - and occasionally, when I was on-air, I'd play the disc directly - as I recall, the discs were both full tracked and data files, so could be used either way. But some of the tracks had multiple effects on them, so if you needed, say, the second "whizz" effect on the track, you had to cue it up, pause the playback, and unpause it when needed.
I remember getting a bunch of sci-fi novels published by Baen. each one had a CD inside with dozens of full, unabridged ebooks and audiobooks in multiple formats. This is fairly unique AFAIK for anything outside of self-study guides.
In 1995 the company I worked for got a contract with a presidential campaign to image contribution checks for federal election commission compliance. We were burning CDRs full of check images and MICR data from them. (We were mainly in the bank checking software business mainly. This was a one-off contract.) Hey, I got to see Steven Spielberg's personal check.
@@AureliusR I don't mind. The FEC maximum at the time was $2000 and that's what it was. It was to Bill Clinton. It was a joint account with his wife Kate Capshaw. No doubt he contributed more through PACs, but we were working directly with the campaign so those limits were strictly adhered to. I didn't vote for him.
I find this video amusing as the narrative is mostly about trying to use these as data mines. I had one of these back when I was playing Starcraft OG, back before you installed the entirety of games on the HDD. I'd leave the top 6 games that I wanted to play in the CD/DVD drive that way I didn't have to swap them in and out, and the PC showed all 6 drives in Explorer. To say I'd use them now, I wouldn't. But back then, I didn't want to touch the discs so... So glad you're doing this full time! Keep up the great work!
Incredible, you're actually the person I dreamed up who just didn't want to swap discs! I respect it tremendously and would have done the same if I'd had the money, lmao. Thank you so much!
@@CathodeRayDude hell yeah! I've got you by a decade or more so there's that too. I envy you and your "job", if I can even call it that. Maybe one of these days I'll dip my toes in the water, but until then, you take me down memory road and even teach this old dog some new tricks. Keep it up!
I remember going to the State Library to access the MLA (Modern Languages Association, the definitive index of literature and literary criticism at the time) database on CD-ROM. They ran it on a stack of CD-ROM drives just like shown here. It was the only way to search the database for several million people, and you just called up the library and booked a time slot to access it. This would have been 1995 or 1996.
I used to have a pioneer music center that used the same cartridges, it was great. Love the videos, your presentation style is really funny AND informative, great stuff.
Brilliant video. Supported a law firm and got to support one of these devices BUT it was 15 single CD ROM drives. Avoiding the lock up you were experiencing. Really enjoyed your video. And reminded me how technology was back then
Such a blast from the past.. I had the home 6 disc pioneer that flashed on the screen when you were talking about the cartridges. Also, the car ones were identical. We had a van with a 6 disc pioneer, and I used to bring one of my magazines from home and put it in my car unit.
This is the first video of yours that I came across and I really enjoyed it. I love simple long format informative videos that are extremely well written. I look forward to binging the rest of your content.
What made the CD such a big thing for me was how cheap they were for companies to make and send. It didn't matter if the CD only had ~10mb on it, because the fact that it was on a CD that cost pennies meant that they bothered to include it where they absolutely would not have included 10 floppies. Magazines came with CDs that had video clips, game demos, software updates, OS updates, etc. MacAddict, PC Gamer, there were even newspapers that included CDs in my area that had video clips and high resolution pictures that went along with stories. The big boon for consumers I think was the drastic drop in friction, not really the storage. The internet was so slow in my area that the only reason I got to play so many game demos or install any patches for my games was because PC Gamer included a ton on their cover disc.
I remember reading an anecdote from Richard Garriott (aka Lord British, creator of Ultima) that if CD-ROMs had came just a little sooner, Origin (his video game company) might've been able to avoid being bought out by EA just because of the savings in manufacturing.
I rejoice when I see these long form videos! usually watch them in 3 sections, but let the video run the whole length the first time, to let youtube know that I actually like long videos and to (probably fruitlessly) change the algorithm. great stuff as usual!!
In China around 2000s, Universities use huge CD-ROM libraries (yes, multiple machines for maybe thousands of disks) serving library services (bibliography and full text database*s*, ebook database, even medline search in my medical colledge days).
Back in the ‘90s I was a sysadmin for a major defense contractor. One of the systems I was responsible for was an optical drive library for our graphics and publications department that used hierarchical storage management (HSM). The server had five 4GB hard drives in a RAID5 array, the optical library followed by a DLT changer. Based on the last access date on the file it would automatically be moved from the hard drives to the optical drives and finally to tape and back again, as necessary. The optical library was a massive thing, about the size of a commercial refrigerator. Ours wasn’t maxed out, having only 6 drives (probably 1.3GB (?) per side WORM or MO drives) and about 128 discs; it could probably store double that number of drives and discs, but ours was relatively minimal during the time I worked there. One slot on the front was used to load the discs, but that wasn’t used often as the discs were never changed unless they failed. There was one robotic arm to pull the disc from the storage rack and put it in the drive. When the opposite side of the disc was needed the robot arm would press the eject button, grab the disc, flip it and then gently reinsert the disc. It was quite a sight. The HSM method worked well at preventing the Windows issues with multiple people trying to grab different bits of data on the same disc. The system handled one task per drive, dumping the requested data onto the server’s hard drives for user access. It was a great way to store huge quantities of data in a way that was easily and automatically accessible by the end the user, although they may have to wait a bit for the requested file to be transferred to the hard drives from whatever media the file may be stored on at that moment in time. Now that same library of data could be stored on one 512GB MicroSD card - how times have changed. In late ‘99 I was going through the accumulated junk mail on my desk when I found an envelope from Kingston. It appeared to be more personalized than the usual generic sales garbage, and I was correct. It was a letter stating that I had won 64GB of RAM, a huge amount at the time. Based on that I ordered a brand new, custom built PowerMac G4 - minimal RAM (I had 64GB on the way after all), a 10GB hard drive (the smallest available) the fast 500 MHz CPU and a DVD-RAM drive. I already had an HP 4X SCSI CD-R but I wanted more storage. The DVD-RAM drive did what it said, but the performance was somewhat lacking, although I suspect that this had more to do with my unrealistic expectations. It was slower than burning a CD, but then again, it was burning considerably more data than a CD. I probably never used it in the manner in which it was intended. Later, at another job, we upgraded the Mac servers we used (that were just there to hold the CEOs address book) with top-of-the-line models which had DVD burners. We didn’t need those drives on the servers so my boss told me to put in some other optical drives and we could each have a DVD burner. Heck yeah! That drive, like my DVD-RAM drive, worked great for playing movies via a hardware decoder, something I probably still have; given what I paid for it I wanted to make sure I got my money’s worth out of it. Even when DVD burners got faster I would still burn at slower speeds for reliability and accuracy. But I’ll be completely honest - I haven’t burned a disc in years. I even have a Blu-Ray burner that I got from a retired friend of mine, but even though I have the media (I bought a 25-pack back in 2018) I have yet to burn a single disc. I mounted the drive in an old SCSI case, converting it to USB 3.0, so it’s not taking up space in a precious 5.25” bay. These days most of my data is stored in piles of 8TB external drives, but even then I can’t keep track of it all; I think some sort of disc cataloguing program is in order, especially if it can find duplicates. I also have literally piles of 500GB drives from used DirecTV DVRs that I would grab for $2-3 each, gutting them just for the drives. I stopped that several years back when 500GB became the modern equivalent of a floppy drive (and I used the drives as such, in an external drive duplicator), and when one of the units was filled with insects, bedbugs in this case, thankfully all dead (I had a disgusting neighbor that infected a building I was living in with bedbugs and I never want to experience that again). You can still find the occasional DVR at the Goodwill Outlet and harvest them. AT&T and DirecTV units work well, but avoid Dish Network units as they have buggered up the drives to make them all but unusable anywhere else. I spent hours tweaking the firmware but eventually throwing in the towel as my time was worth more than the 500GB drive I would have in the end.
I bet some school IT departments have a lot of that software in a box under a bench somewhere. I remember installing LexisNexis and MSDN on labs full of computers in the late 90s/early 2000s at a Community College where I worked.
Considering my ancient R710 LFF cost me $1000 a few years back, and a 20TiB SAS drives sets me back $300, the 40 TiB ZFS array (complete with a 400GiB SAS SSD cache for said ZFS array) that holds thousands of movies and hundreds of full-run TV shows, it amazes me how quickly the whole storage problem got 'solved'. This hardware is ancient, yet the server software driving it is quick and modern, and hits all my devices no matter where I am, provided I have Internet access.
At university in the early -mid 2000s i remember there being a catalogue frontend to a CD jukebox on the library PCs. Youd browse through the list of CD-ROMs in a dedicated programme and select one which would then be mounted on a network share. There were limits on how many people could use it so the session management was basically one user per cd transport i think
Closest thing I've seen to a decent library on a disc was done by Baen Books, Jim's (RIP old man you're still missed) idea which he pushed to authors was publishing a certain percentage of their prior works on disc with the books that were sold, combined with the Baen Free Library it served as a pretty impressive marketing gimmick, as it got people reading some of the authors they knew less and purchasing the novels.
So much nostalgia for me for the pioneer changer cartridges. We had a music version of this and I can't believe you even have the little genre stickers, amazing.
As others mentioned, I know several BBS's used these jukeboxes to provide huge file libraries. They often had limited number of concurrent users, so it would work out quite well.
In 1998 while at UCSF we had a huge CD library that needed to be online because MRIs were huge. We used multiple towers on linux with experimental support. Worked good enough.
@@beepyshenanigans lol what? linux had the best driver support of any unix as far back as 1995. i've been using linux and nearly every for pay unix since the early 90s.
@@beepyshenanigansfor "real" computers in the 90s, the kind of stuff that would run Windows NT4, Linux had decent driver support since this is what developers or college students typically had access to at the time. Support for SCSI was excellent.
watching this video is like watching gravis live through that episode of TNG where the universe keeps contracting and things that were readily at hand yesterday have not only ceased to exist today but never existed at all
I majored in computer engineering and scheduling was one of the topics in my embedded systems class. Scheduling algorithms are used to manage resources among a set of tasks (e.g., CDs among a set of users). It is a complicated problem with many solutions, but the goal is to schedule the tasks in a way that minimizes certain metrics like latency, deadline misses, execution time, etc. Also note that the tasks could be split into multiple parts. The algorithms we talked about in class included: Weighted Round Robin (WRR), offline cyclic scheduling, Rate Monotonic scheduling (RM), Dynamic Priority Scheduling, First-In First-Out, Earliest Deadline First (EDF), and Least Slack Time First (LST). Some of them assign priorities to the tasks like WRR and others focus on metrics like EDF and LST. EDF is simple enough, as it prioritizes the task that needs to be finished first.
That Proliant 8000 in your picture could have up to 21 hard disks with the optional extra SCSI backplanes (my one has 8 X Pentium III Xeon and 21 x 9.2Gb SCSI disks)
Maybe I'm weird, but I'm nostalgic for the millennium styling of the PowerFile with the colorful glossy transparent front that's curved, with the big inset semi-sphere for the DVDs to be inserted into. It reminds me of the original CRT iMacs of the same era, which came in all kinds of colors. I kinda hope this style has a resurgence in the future!
I absolutely remembered these from my school. We used them in the computer lab and the library, and they allowed several machines to access things like game disks and encyclopedias without the instructor having to risk us handling CD-ROMs. It also let the expensive computers from before the CD-ROM era use content on CDs (and the CDs were often many times larger than the hard drives on the older machines). We had a bunch of Mac LCs (the original, not LC 5200s or whatever) that had PhoneNet AppleTalk connections to get to a CD-ROM 'server' via an Ethernet to AppleTalk adapter. It was cost effective and 'fast' compared to buying CD drives for each machine or having ten copies of each software title.
The name "DVD Player" suits the simplicity of the app. You really cannot do a single other thing with it besides "play DVD" LOL. Part of me wonders why they didn't just bake the DVD Player functionality into QuickTime? Seems like the more logical choice...
Awesome video! I recall going from store to store to buy out all their writeable CDs, sometimes for as much as $50 cdn each, when I was developing a CD-ROM c++ tutorial at IBM in late 1993.
Those giant Panasonic ones you mentioned, I saw one of those when I was on a tour at Kodak back in the early 90's. They were very proud of the unit which stored something like 250GB in an era when that was just...staggering.
I won't lie the idea of the DVD backup jukebox is still appealing to me now. I know that DVDs are not as long-lasting as the original advertisements claimed back in the 90s, but for things like photos they seem to be pretty resilient.
This was a really nice trip down memory lane. 😂 As a first year student, writing my first term papter in 1992, on compact Macs in a computer lab, saving the paper on a floppy, it was all bound paper indices of abstracts, and the library catalog was accessed by dumb terminals with green CRTs. At least we could print the catalog hits on tractor fed paper on a pin matrix printer, and run around the stacks to find the bound journals. In 1997, first year as a grad student, the university had access to services that sent articles by *_fax_* after accessing the abstracts on my PowerBook1400 logged into the library remotely. And since I could receive faxes on my PowerBook, that’s what I did. These days you get the article PDF, or even the whole book, right away, with one click from the library’s catalog search page. 😊
Before CD ROMs, there was… microfilm. In 1988 I worked for a company called Imnet that was trying to build a business around scanning and storing insurance and banking records for later retrieval. They built a washing machine sized robotic microfilm reader. It stored hundreds of rolls of microfilm that could be robotically loaded on demand, film forwarded to the correct frame, scanned and made available to a server. In 8 seconds!
These type of databases were often used in conjunction with microfilm. The database was for finding what you needed, but the actual thing would be stored on microfilm. When I did my undergrad not all journals were digital yet (at least not fully), so I sometimes used databases like this (off a network, not CD-ROM) but needed to get the actual article text from microfilm.
I'd love to see / have seen that 8 second process happening. That sounds awesome. UA-cam surely has something 😂
I kinda loved the haptics of going through archived newspapers on microfilm. It was definitely not very convenient when doing research about historical events, but it was .. somehow more tangible than just using Google.
the sound must have been amazing
I worked for a utility in the early/mid nineties. Optical storage was used in the stead of microfiche. they produced tens off thousands of sheets of microfiche. I once had to re-index the microfiche by hand. I can still feel the cuts on my hands from handling it. Death by a thousand cuts.
I work for a marketing company, we just moved office we were cleaning out the storeroom and there were no joke thousands of CDs of stock photos and clip art and fonts.
From my experience with the Pioneer machines they were meant to be used with Macintosh. There were Extensions that let you change the disc being accessed by the finder and did not create confusion by pretending to have all your discs available at once. The Mac software was so much more well thought out and the windows software felt like an afterthought. I had the 18 disc version and it was a wonderful way to organise mac games and general data. I found it all in the thrift shop in a small town in British Colombia along with a grey PowerMac (model escapes me, one of the ones in the larger horizontal desktop cases which sat horizontally and was grey from before they changed their design language.) The changer came with the cartridges and worked flawlesslessly. If my collection hadn't been stolen I would post pictures.
Working in networking for almost 20 years, and still, nothing beats the bandwidth of an 18-wheeler.
Well, that’s why Amazon actually has data trucks, that you could use to move a truckload of data to AWS.
@@BTGDelta a literal truckload of data!
Well, depending on the distance maybe the bandwidth of a jet could win right?
yeah but how do you feel about ip over carrier pidgeon
@@BTGDelta I think it's called AWS snowball
Those huge linear actuator coils were to reduce skips caused by vibration. This is before the overspin got crazy enough to just try again when the disk came back around. The transport lock was to prevent shipping damage, or damage from mobile use. No, the did not work in a moving truck, but they were used in some mobile applications such as oil drilling rigs and oil exploration rigs (i.e. thumper trucks). These rigs had custom integration that did things like suspend the os and park the hard disk if you took it out of park or released the parking brake (or powered up the thumper engine). You could the drive and resume operation without having to do a full boot and load of applications. Early thumper trucks would record the seismic data to analog tape, which would be digitized and analyzed before moving the truck to the next site. These were specialized devices so every little niche you could cover could mean a huge increase in your potential market.
Very cool explanation!!! Much appreciated! Definitely an edge edge edge edge case!
When doing a basement evacuation from a friend to rescue a bunch of classic computers, I've found his old SCSI CD tower. This CD tower was used by a popular Amiga piracy BBS in Western Europe; they had one burner, and storing the BBS's data archive on burned CDs was a lot more convenient for bulk storage than contemporary hard drives.
Yeah these massive CD library systems were a big hit with BBS guys for the short time period between their existence and the BBS scene falling apart in the wake of internet access. Some bragged about how many CDs full of data they had active to entice guests, especially the ones that went semi-pro and started charging for extra access!
@@fishmecha CDs would have been more reliable as an archive ..
@@paulluce2557 Many discs from the 80's are already unreadable. That's about right though, even a little better than predicted. Tapes seem to still be the most stable/reliable and easy to duplicate if offline backup is mandated. (Tapes though, man I hate tapes) The last place I worked we had tech from the 70's-modern day. We were required to have offline daily backup of slot machine/lottery pays/wins/losses. We even still had an IBM big iron with a reel to reel modified for modern tapes. It was stupid, we used it to print out logistics data for operations.
Unfortunately my dad, a work from home lawyer, has not got the old westlaw CDs anymore. They aren't super secret. They aren't required to return or anything. They were just completely superseded by the online version that became free through the local bar association, and so the CDs became trash. They're all 5 to 15 years deep in landfills by now is the most likely fate of most CDs like this, honestly.
I was that weird kid in middle school (7/8th grade in 1997/8) that hung out with the IT admin. The whole school (district actually) ran Mac OS and they used several CD server towers to share various CDs. The “computer lab” had its own tower, the teachers their own, and there was a public one. Each were a full sized tower case with 6 or 7, or more individual CD drives. They didn’t use a multi changer like the Nakamichi at all. Each disc was in its own drive and I don’t ever recall there being an access issue. I don’t know if each tower had its own sever but I do recall each tower was served over different AppleTalk zones. Lovely video as always ❤
Same -- cut my teeth working for my school system. We had a few of these towers on the network and would drop in the discs we'd need for the day.
Main downside was if more than one client was pulling from a CD share it'd seriously slow down -- so in practice each tech would have "their" tower.
So a little picky, but it was a major efficiency gain. Instead of sitting at a PC juggling discs we could roll a script, start it on a machine and prep the next ones (e.g. blow out the dust, do whatever wasn't scripted, etc)
God appletalk was so good. I don't know how well it worked at scale but it's certainly been the easiest of era network solution for filesharing I've ever used. Even in modern systems. I'm actually looking to include appletalk on my file server for my friends and I classic macs so we can share programs!
Yeah, I think one thing missing from this discussion is just how bad it is to have multiple users trying to read from the _same_ CD. Seek times for optical media were not good, so if it had to seek between two places on a disc, it was nearly as bad as the disc changer thrashing problem.
Yep, me too. I know this cos I’m friends with two IT admins on Facebook lol!!!
There are two kinds of computer nerds: the ones that hung out with their school IT admin, and the ones that the school IT admin despised. I was the latter 😈
20:45 - Can confirm - my first job was in 1992 as an intern at the company my dad was an IT manager for. A large national company with dozens of offices. They were upgrading all their Macs to System 7. They had a site license for it, but Apple only shipped one set of floppy disks. My job was to make copies of the install disks so that each office had two full sets. The funny part was that the fastest computer in the office was the only one with dual floppy drives (a Macintosh IIfx) so that's what I was given to use. I really quickly discovered the Disk Copy utility had an "image disk" and "write image to disk" functions (that apparently none of the actual IT employees knew about) so the second drive became irrelevant quickly. (Since System 7 wasn't multitasking, it could only read or write one disk at a time. Dual drives were because in theory it would read from one as it wrote to the second; but with imaging, that was moot.)
System 7 could multitask, but it was cooperative and single-threaded so any program could seize up the system if written poorly.
@@Desmaad And certain tasks did take complete control. Disk formatting, the Disk Copy app, etc.
For me, the absolute killer app for CDRom was Public Domain (PD) software libraries. In one fell swoop, instead of paying $1.27 plus P&P for a single diskette. I could spend $32 and get everything they got on a couple of CDs. Mind blowing.
1001 Great Games! Mostly junk but plenty of gems!
Ah, shovelware, the soulless digital exploitation of the 90s! ;) But, although many people call it soulless, it was without sarcasm so much better than the present soulless exploitation of Internet users. They couldn't pry into users data and they had no way to squeeze gameplayes for money. Especially considering the latter factor, I feel the ratio of good software to bad was about the same as you'd find in a modern app store. I also had a better time with shovelware than with GNU/Linux in the following decade. GNU philosophy and propaganda effectively marginalized programmers who took pride in producing a good product.
@@eekee6034 well that was a bit of an odd tangent heh. Anyway, those shovelware discs were like $5. You knew what you were getting for the most part. There was nothing particularly exploitive about it other than some profit made on other's work but there was some value in the disc existing at all. Lots of fun little games and stuff.
@@Aeduo Yes, I'm happy they existed. :)
I wish there was a 1PB CD-ROM , imagine a copy of the GPT model in your home computer for your queries without any spying or "you can't ask that", all running locally in your GPU, well if your GPU could just use normal DDR5 memory without being that expensive (nvidia is robbing everyone by selling memory more expensive than what it really is)
That would be a killer feature for a new bigger CD-ROM nowadays.
Around 1996, my university had IEEE magazines archive in 10s of CDs. The archive contained OCRed copies of the actual paper magazines! It was amazing back then as students and researches didn't have to use microfilm/microfiche or flip through paper magazines. The IEEE archive were installed on two computers in the library, where each computer had its own set of CDs in an interchangeable SCSI jukebox.
I owe my career to my Dad's MSDN collection. Every OS, App, and Dev tool Microsoft made with quarterly updates. I'd bet not many other teenagers had win 2k and visual studio 6 on their Compaq. Having a CD changer like the cassette version would have been great considering how many times I blew up the install.
I doubt it was you blowing up the installs
I worked at a law library for a while. I’ve seen a lot of westlaw disks but mostly because they get separated from their parent book or set and tossed in a box and put away with the microfiche and data tapes. Any library with a decent budget has by now thrown all of those away, mine didn’t because we had too much to do and not enough staff.
These would have seemed so amazing when I was eleven years old in 1993.
Tay?? Love your stuff man!
♫ Chocolate Rain! ♫
If I would of had one of these in highschool, I would of been king 😂.
@@BAIGAMINGFinal Fantasy walkthru boss!
You, sir, have exquisite taste. I see your comments on so many videos I watch. Mostly niche and/or smaller channels.
One cottage industry taking off around that time was home machine embroidery. My mom sold software and machines as well as gave lessons. Those click art CDs are a literal gold mine for that type of thing. Back then the digitizing software was at least 2,000 USD if not 10,000, and it was like tracing a bitmap file to a vector one miniscule line segment at a time. Over time they did get better with fill effects, for automatic flocking or whatever they do. Anyway, being able to browse the illustration files, because line art could very early on be auto-traced to varying degrees of success, pick a cool animal and then have it on a shirt pocket. Wild.
I actually was that guy who got sick and tired of disc swapping with a single CD ROM drive, but I solved my issue with a double bay sized, 5 or 6-disc unit that I'm pretty sure LGR did a video on. Riven was absolutely the catalyst for this, but I was also really into a game called Timelapse which I think came on 4 or 5 discs. I really was of the assumption that multi-disc games were the wave of the future, and I don't know if I could have been any more wrong!😂
One really big use case for the CD-ROM jukebox drives was BBS sysops. If your BBS listing can brag that you have 1+GB downloadable wares, that puts you in a pretty big disk energy kind of mood in ~1992. It would draw callers in from out of state, if you really went to town with the idea. There were large multi-line boards that had numerous CDROM collections available for leeching. I think they experimented with membership fees at one point. Anyway, jukebox tech was big with sysops.
Absolutely. On one BBS I remember having to wait for the CD changer to change before I could access the various file areas that were associated with each disc. I remember it presenting the various Night Owl shareware discs on a menu.
What i'm taking from this is _big disk energy_
In the early 90's we setup a 6 line bbs with 6 computers networked together that each had two cdrom drives that ran at 2x speed. 12x cd drives total and it used a $900 diskdrive that was a HUGE 1000MB to hold the searchable index. Lasted about 2 years until dialup internet changed the landscape.
Way way back when (1993/94) I created CD-ROMs with encrypted patient data to send to hospitals. This allowed each hospital to have basic records for each patient and then request more records overnight over the network. This completely filled a CD-ROM.
This was still a thing in 2014. Mostly to send imaging (MRI, etc) to small offices/clinics. We were still ordering Dell machines with Windows10 for the diagnostic stations that had DVD/CD writers so these discs could be made.
Everyone else was pulling the data over internet once things like Epic CareEverywhere became a standard thing in the late 2010's for cross clinic data sharing. (The place I worked at the time was one of the first ones to fully implement this, and it was like 2016, CDs and fax before that!)
@@slightlyevolvedyeah I remember being given a burned CD with X-ray and MRI results in 2011. To take to my doctor back home or something. I was kind of annoyed they weren’t just high res pictures I could look at, it was all obfuscated.
@@OmarRodriguez-vl2tq could you see what was on it on a normal computer? Was it still bundled in a proprietary file format?
@@kaitlyn__L It was probably Dicom which is pretty much a standard for medical imagery. Multiple viewers are available.
Hey, that DVD changer looks like a prototype version of the Kaleidascape! I worked for an AV company starting in 2012 and these were very popular with movie buffs who wanted huge libraries. It used to let you rip your discs as ISOs and store them on a hard drive, but they got sued over it, so for legal reasons they started selling these giant disc carousels so you could just leave all the discs inserted, then pick a movie you wanted to watch and it would play that disc.
They had Blu-ray versions too, but it's basically the exact same thing - a giant 200-disc carousel that spun and would store your movies. Like the one you showed, you could daisy-chain them together and have up to like 1000 discs on a single unit's main page. And like your unit, it was a slot loader, one disc at a time. We'd have interns sitting there loading discs for hours for the customers 🤣
But also you could take the lid off and just manually insert the discs. It would still need to re-scan but you save time on sticking them in the slot that way.
Kaleidascape was a lot more refined, and had HDMI/component/composite outputs on the back, no computer needed. You'd just plug it into your TV and could use a remote to select the movie you wanted to watch. In other words, the PowerFile walked so Kaleidascape could run😩
Holy crap, doing UA-cam full time must've really helped with getting projects done, wasn't expecting an HOUR long video so soon! Thank you so much for your incredible work!
Always funny to see younger generations talk about what I lived. I was a BBS SysOp. We used these extensively for our users to download shareware. Shareware CDs were published and we would use these to store all those files. Games, apps, whatever was put on volumes that we had software that knew where these files were and would switch to that CD and allow the user to download it. Wildcat BBS and some door software often was some of the ways we made all this work. I think BBS operators were some of the biggest consumers of these devices.
Yup. Ran a board for years and went through a few variants of these as well. Great days.
Old men yell at cloud (computing).
I have seen one of these in the real world, and the process of scheduling access and limiting thrashing was solved by people sending emails back and forth asking for time to use the library during dedicated time slots. When these were scheduled, you would get about an hour with the whole system entirely to yourself. If someone else tired to access it at the same time, yes, thrashing would occur but usually the person who was scheduled would very quickly locate the person who was causing the interference and go yell at them. It was a small-ish design firm of about 30 people, and they were using it with a large collection of stock media, fonts, and textures that could be applied to 3D models. They had a big library that could store 500 CDs, and they were still using it as late as 2010 because "What we have works, darn it, we're not upgrading".
Gotta love that bus priority control system there was yell at a mf to stop accessing.
@@fordesponja I remember many days just hiding in the corner with my computer switched off, because people constantly tried to blame me for their 'hacking' (thrashing) the disc server to get out of doing their assignments; Hoping that eventually when the (competent) admin would come to yell at me -and- they'd notice that I was literally doing nothing - instead of the 'student' pausing their mischief when I was forced to leave the room.
It took _months_ but if the admin was furious enough when he came with the vice-principal to expel me to actually verify that the computer was cold, (and that I hadn't switched the machine off to avoid being caught while runners continued to tell 'on me' for the active thrashing.) Then I do not have the words to describe the absolute warpath he went on to see the trouble makers punished.
In the remaining years I was at that school not only did I _never_ see another 'assistant'/junior IT staff again, and the remaining staff reminded students not to mention them where the admin may hear. -- But two schools later the librarian/online-CD-collection-admin had heard some version about what happened, and 'gently' handed me discs for the first year to make certain that (CD) resource collisions couldn't be used to hold me back.
( And the 'students' that enabled them to avoid doing the jobs they'd been paid to were told that it wasn't always me - Though I was not allowed to hide during computer classes anymore. )
@@fordesponjajust like when you were on the landline and your parent needed to make a call!
As mentioned in the video, when the juke boxes were teamed with a hard drive (or two) to cache frequently used files, response time got a lot better.
The timing on this is amusing for me. I work for a company that specializes in uploading data off old storage mediums to the cloud. Just recently we've been asked to quote on a job to process and upload 125'000 CD-ROM's. So I have been looking into CD Jukeboxes like this and whether we can we repurpose them for our needs. We've also just taken delivery of an IBM TS3500 Tape Library into our offices that we're planning to use for automating ingest of LTO and IBM 3592 tapes.
As you were explaining the massive amounts of storage a CD-ROM gave you at the time, I just kept hearing the lady from “300MB” in my head… and then you played a clip of her!
Every time he does it, Neil Cicierega intensifies in my head: ua-cam.com/video/mSHUIEDBbl4/v-deo.html
came down to the comments to look just for this. gravis knows his audience VERY well.
In the early 2000s working at an MSP we had quite a few customers using CD-Rs for backups. They'd purchase a spool of 100 discs and swap out a disc every morning, storing the old one in a different spool after writing the date on the label. We even had a few cycle through a spool of CD-RWs too. I kind of miss those days - months worth of air-gapped easily recoverable backups.
They still have the advantage of being truly read-only and invulnerable to ransomware.
@@dmatech but so do tapes, and those can be way more data dense, faster, and with better environmental survivability
We used five, five disk changers for our Mitchell automotive reference library in the mid 1990s until the early 2000s when it was transitioned to online databases. Every year we would get three or four disk to update and every couple if years the entire library was changed out. It beat pulling books out, but was really a pretty silly and extremely clunky system
7 to bypass registation crazy.
Ug, Mitchell auto... that was rough, moved to a shop with alldata and fell in love. 😊
@@kwisin1337 Even though I was alldata certified, in most shops I never used it much.
Though mitchell on demand typically worked good enough, and some fancy shops had identifix (tech info). But the old mitchell on disc was a headache.
@@kwisin1337 I actually used both for some time. They both had thier up and down sides, at least at the time. I've been out of the industry since 2015, and I'm sure it's changed a bit. From 1993, when we acquired the system, until we went completely online, with faster internet and computers, I moatly used the computer for refrences after 1992, the last library we had updated. It was usually much quicker to pull a book off the shelf than to wait for a changer and a 66Mhz DX2 😆 There was a slight novelty to the disc system though. The more I think about it, the more I remember no really caring for it too much.
Ah yes, Novell Netware configurations and when it went down....
I worked for an airline, and we had repair records older than 5 years on CD, and used one of these systems, but it didn't have any scheduling, as there were only a few people that would ever need to access them. Even older repairs were on microfilm. I think I only ever had to look at the microfilm twice in ten years. Also, while I was there the engineering library went from a dozen bookshelves to a file on a server. This was all in the 2010's.
As late as 2004 (and probably beyond) Dell was scanning every single document to CDs/DVD’s. There was a room dedicated to it at Round Rock 1 with a constant green glow and burning drives
It an extremely surreal, all white room with shelves lining the walls all filled with plastic circles. It was like you’d walked into a room on a flying saucer
The good ol' days
there's an alienware joke in here somewhere
@@LonelySpaceDetective Dell bought Alienware.
@@Look_What_I_Did Well yeah, that's exactly why I said that.
@@LonelySpaceDetective Said what?
I interned in the I.T. department at a large retailer's home office. They had a CD library server with (I think) 90 CD drives in it. It was the size of a chest freezer. Hardly anyone was allowed to physically touch the thing. I know I accessed it a few times, mainly to remotely install software (usually Microsoft Office) onto new workstation builds. It was just another server in the network tree, and each drive looked like a folder. This was in the 90s, a (mostly) NT 4.0 enironment.
Your presentation style is amazing. Somehow it cuts straight through my ADHD and focuses me right in on the content even with how long and exhaustively considered every video is. Thank you
Probably because he knows firsthand what it’s like! In fact his blog post/website article about ADHD is what got me started on the path of realising I also had it. I bet if any sections get too long or prop-less he reworks them.
@@kaitlyn__L You "realised" you had it, did that work for getting you the "kiddie crank"? If it did then I'm off to the store! I will "realise" I have many ailments!
@@james-faulkner thanks for your very mature reaction to a brief summation of years of research, introspection, and indeed discussion with medical staff.
I also appreciate your playing-into the decades-old trope about drugseeking. Even though Gravis’ article discusses how many meds don’t work for many people and how you need to develop other coping mechanisms and workarounds too.
You’re an extremely original thinker, a true intellectual maverick
@@kaitlyn__L Ahh the poor little Gen Z got their feelings hurt. ADHD was invented so we X'rs could drug our kids and get them to shut up. Just be glad you aren't like the majority of the population and self-medicate, you will always have your supply now that you are addicted and I presume convinced that your inability to pay attention is some how related to your developmental retardation. Oh that's right can't say that either, now we say "on the spectrum".
My ex-wife put my kid on that crap and what a weirdo he turned into. It had nothing to do with genetics Believe me!
Vote Blue! Really, vote blue! (if you are old enough)
@@james-faulknerHe who smelt it, dealt it...
The Toronto Reference Library used to have a bunch of these CD-ROM databases. You couldn't check them out, or even take them out of a specific area of the library (because as you said they probably cost a fortune), but you could browse them there, and copy what you needed to something else or print it. I remember using them for a project in high school.
These were pretty popular with BBSes. One person would make the purchase and we would dial in to download shareware.
'shareware.'
@@vylbird8014My *first* thought too :P
@@vylbird8014backups ;)
Yep. I mentioned on an old Twitter thread that a BBS could swap discs unattended, copy the requested file to a hard drive temporarily, and let the user download the file while other users download stuff from other discs. It's conceptually very similar to mainframe tape robots.
@@vylbird8014 all ware is shareware
Another popular module was the Axis Storpoint CD.
It was a SCSI-to-Ethernet server that allowed CDROM libraries to be accessed by SMB, NFS or HTTP.
It's a 5.25 module that would be compatible with your SCSI Express Tower and would fit in the 8th drive bay.
Back when I was in public school, we had one of those CDROM Jukebox Servers with a Storpoint module and it attached to the School's Netware network
Definitely implemented on Novell servers for education / schools back in those days. (Back when I was in school) There were numerous advantages. Firstly, if the discs were given out to teachers, that meant they could easily be stolen or lost. Secondly, they had to have many copies because a lot of the teachers wanted them. As mentioned in the video it was a copious amount of data / knowledge - way bigger than hard drives of the time. Having it available across the whole school was liberating. Students didn't need to always go to the library to research something from World Book Encyclopedia or Encarta (World Book had way better text, while Encarta had more multimedia like videos and audio) The mild inconvenience of a changer swap was literally no sweat at the time. Besides most had dedicated drives and didn't have changer tech. I think changers were more for archival where you literally rarely accessed the data.
As someone who knew someone *ahem* that rented all 10 seasons of the Simpsons from Blockbuster, a season a weekend and then laboriously ripped with DVD Decrypter and converted them to mp4, the Powerfile with the burner would have been amazing (in a hellish way). Oh thing the things we did before streaming.
As of Sep 2023 you can now put 33 seasons in it. Haha.
I think this barbarian build is for durability. Swapping disks multiple times a day... bigger solenoids bigger durability.
The mechanism in the first Pioneer makes a lot of sense if you think about how much would have cost them to spin up a new production line for a niche product with uncertain future instead of just using the one they were already making for the car changers.
the car changer one would also be fairly robust since it has to deal with the vibration of the car and road.
Yeah honestly it may look cheap but reliability wise it looked far more robust than the newer powerfile
@@steverogers8163plus the magazine specifically bragged it was more durable than the home music changer, so I’m sure they could’ve used smaller motors but just chose not to
@@steverogers8163 Yeah that was what came to my mind also immediately. This is way over build, who needs that much vibratio.... right Pioneer was into car CD changers for high end luxury cars. So they probably just took their car changer carriage system and packaged it in a box for enterprise use. On top of that they could boldly claim "heavy duty, reliable mechanism" since it was literally build to take road bumps and keep the reader going. Hence the massive linear motor rails and so on. Meant to hold the read head in place against a surprising number of newtons of force. As said also... once they had the robust mechanism, it was just cheaper to keep the production line running and put it in everything, than make separate weaker model.
Also it's Pioneer.... they never were exactly a cheap botton bargain brand. So they could justify the price, even if some bean counter went "well if we made gazillion of the cheaper ones, the cost per mechanism would be cheaper" and execs probably went "or we can just sell this one with bigger cost per mechanism and price accordingly, our target customers can afford it".
That's what I also wanted to add, somewhat. The changer cartridge looks exactly like those of car stereos, where you had a changer in the back of the car. So my guess would have been as well that the mechanism is simply from a car changer that actually needs to withstand a lot more than a stationary unit.
I've been following you since you were filming in your basement and you've always been a great storyteller but this one is on a whole other level, fantastic video
What a nice trip down memory lane. Somewhere in 1997 I bought a product called D-Sat - a collection of satellite images of Germany on 11 CDs. As a geology student at that time it was incredibly useful. My PC back then was a trusty old K6-2 with at least 3 hard drives amounting to about 1.5 GB of local storage. Google Maps was still 1.5 decades away and the disk swaps were tedious. I certainly had no money to spend on multiple CD Drives or even disk changers. Thank you for your work on your videos and your channel. I've been a long time fan and subscriber so please continue your great work.
Regards.
Pioneer also made a 700-disc library with up to sixteen drives called the DRM-7000. It could be equipped with either CD or DVD drives with recording capability, and had a standalone 20-disc magazine changer in the top.
why wouldn't it just come with DVD readers? were early ones not capable of reading CDs?
@@TheAechBomb Possibly the higher cost of the DVD drives. These were very high-end drives.
@@douro20 I suppose, but if they store over 500 discs I imagine it'd be worth a little extra cost to be able to read multiple foemats
@@TheAechBombHow much do you think this thing cost in today's $? I don't think it was sold @ Best Buy, and maybe if you could afford it then $2-$3k WOULD be considered a "little extra cost", but my guess is it went for like $30-$35,000 USD in today $ (or $16-$20k in 1999)? Does anyone know?
I had 5 PowerFile C200 units that were retired from a TV station in 2007, and they worked great using a Linux system back then. They saved me tons of time copying my DVD collection to my home theater PC... 😊
I use to work for a company that produced COLD archival software. The main client base was the finance and banking sector. We recommended MO jukeboxes (then later UDO) for the storage.
I was on the front lines of the MO to UDO upgrades. Unfortunately, the UDO media was not backward compatible with MO drives. When upgrading customers from MO to UDO drives we basically copied all the data from the existing MO disks to new UDO disks (typically multiple 1-4GB MO disk copied to 30GB UDO disks) while generating extensive auditing logs to maintain chain of authenticity with the original document. The MO disks would then be stored in a cupboard with a single standalone MO drive attached to the server for access if ever needed.
Thanks for a nice trip down memory lane.
Thanks especially for the shot of the Borland manuals. My dad had their compiler suite and I remember all those books sitting around, which I futilely tried to learn to program from (I ended up years later learning from UA-cam and Stack Overflow).
Just learned today that "as was the style at the time" is a running Simpsons bit you've been doing for years.
Hit me like a truck.
Gravis, THANK YOU for article on ADHD on your website. It seriously changed my life, it changed my position on how I look at myself and my life. Thank you 🙏
You’d probably enjoy looking into the behind the scenes at the British Library (and really any other mega/deposit library). The BL has a ton of robots that retrieve books (or really crates of books for humans to pull the actual item from).
Readers can get large amounts of the microfilms, books, newspapers and other physical items in the collection in ~70 mins from a request.
cool
I was expecting it since the last video with you talking about listening to your entire music library without switching a disc, and there it finally is, it's the disc donut!
Before my dad finally converted to a media server the centerpiece of our home media center was a slowly growing array of CD, DVD and eventually Blu-Ray donut disc changers. They were actually very different to the one you showed off, less features, one less reader and no burner, no data disc format was supported at all since they just plugged into the TV and ran their own firmware. That firmware did come with it's own level of jank, but unlike windows drivers they actually worked, and were nearly perfect for someone who amassed a wall to wall DVD collection. I say nearly because most of those machines had no clue what was put inside until you told it, which for a large collection all going in at once results in spending a large chunk of your weekend playing each disc, waiting through unskippable ads until you figured out what movie it was, and then ejecting the disc back into the donut so you could add it's name onto the list, thank god they had a PS/2 port for a keyboard.
That DOS program layout at 18:43 reflects how academic results display today when you search databases like Gale, Ebsco, etc. That is wild how they have standardized things.
Gravis, THANK YOU for an article on your website about ADHD. Ive read (and listened to) it dozens of times in this and last year, and IT inspired me to go to a clinic, and get diagnosed. I'm in my 30s and whole my life struggled with ADHD related problems. THANK YOU!
P.S. Never have been so early!
It was instrumental in these last 2 years, bc of the war there were a lot of the stress on my nerves. And attending group therapy on coping with ADHD symptoms helped a lot.
"Making me nervous" by Brad Sucks has ended up in my playlist because of you, and it's been in my head nonstop for about 3 weeks.
My uncle had a an AV install business around the Seattle area. So my grandpa always had the good stuff. He had one of those 300 disc DVD carousal. The remote control was an HP tablet with winxp. It wasnt a great set up, but about that time we were laboriously converting all of the dvds to files with a cracked DIVX encoder. good times
We had one of those Asaki DVD writer robots at work! It had six DVD burners all controlled with FCAL/fo, and held something in excess of 1000 cdroms!
It was the backend archiving unit for a broadcast music video library, all controlled by a front porch digital assets management system, that also controlled a Sony Petasite.
I went down the Sound Ideas rabbit hole a few years ago. I was revisiting one of my all time favorite albums, _Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness_ by The Smashing Pumpkins. There's a song on that album called, "Where The Boys Fear To Tread," that sampled a sound effect I recognized immediately as the rocket explosion in Doom. After a few minutes research, I figured out that Doom took it from that sound library and so SP was actually sampling that, not Doom.
You're right about the sound effect, but you're wrong about the licensing. I just pulled my copy of Mellon Collie off the shelf, and the liner notes say "Explosion from DOOM courtesy of id Software, Inc. and Bobby Prince Music." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I used these. And built (my own) of these. SCSI mainly. And normally CDRW drives. In case anyone now thinks they would like to have their dozen data CDROMs available instantly, you can now make virtual CDROM "stacks" of five, 10, 50, etc., CDROMs which you rip to .ISO and share over a Linux/BSD server. Which is what I used to do the minute it became possible. :)
Loved this video. You covered pretty much everything about my CDROM revolution.
I remember that BBS Magazine would have ads for CD rom collections of shareware for Sysops to host content on their BBS's for download. There was even a satellite data service at some point advertised.
DUDE... this video MADE MY DAY!!
Thanks you for this. I was born in 1985 and remember those COREL collections, friends of my parents had a design studio and had those around.
THANKS for this!
I have always liked these things, and have a 604X here, so it's nice to see these things covered. Pioneer lasers from that period do tend to fall out - I had exactly the same situation last month. Cleaned everything up, bit of superglue on the side, popped it back in - works fine. Of course, any glue on the lens and it would be game over, but with nothing to lose it's definitely worth a try.
That's good news, I don't think I have quite the patience to try and fix it myself but it does mean I'm more likely to find someone I can ship it to who's going to put in the effort to give this thing another chance. Thanks!
I need to check my 1804X to see if that's what's wrong with mine. Sounds like a good weekend project!
Replacing the laser pickup assembly isn't a huge job. Every one of these lasers will eventually give out, but Pioneer only used a few different variations.
Hey man it was cool seeing you randomly at RE:PC yesterday. Thanks for the cool videos about weird stuff I never would have known about otherwise.
Loved the video. You've gotta be one of the most interesting people to watch on youtube imo. Covering cool stuff, giving it the screentime it deserves, yet keeping me engaged throughout. Very rare a UA-cam video gets moved from the secondary monitor for background noise to my main screen these days, but this did it for me. Thank you for the entertainment and education
One underrated but essential aspect of your videos that deserves more praise is how good you are at making we the viewer empathize with the hypothetical consumers of the time in a given scenario.
You could've just told us businesses need access to lots of data and moved on, for example, but instead you gave the situational context so that we could really step into the shoes of the target consumer at the time, and fully get just why this would be such a big deal to them.
And I think that kind of thing really makes your videos stand out among others. 💯
Sound ideas in the thumbnail got me so excited. I bought some Hollywood edge libraries (now owned by sound ideas) used on eBay and they came in caddies, little sliding door and everything. I meticulously took them out one at a time to rip them. The booklet even had handwritten bug notes from a chess game stuffed inside.
I also own the General 6000 and I’m pretty sure they’re just normal CD audio discs. I ripped them with Adobe audition no problem, I never tried to access the files directly. That being said, the modern documentation for it mentions specific wav files, some of which are broken down as multiple CD tracks on the original discs.
We used the General 6000 in the campus radio station (in the early 00s) for making promos, sweepers, jingles, and so on. It was massive - and occasionally, when I was on-air, I'd play the disc directly - as I recall, the discs were both full tracked and data files, so could be used either way. But some of the tracks had multiple effects on them, so if you needed, say, the second "whizz" effect on the track, you had to cue it up, pause the playback, and unpause it when needed.
I remember getting a bunch of sci-fi novels published by Baen. each one had a CD inside with dozens of full, unabridged ebooks and audiobooks in multiple formats.
This is fairly unique AFAIK for anything outside of self-study guides.
In 1995 the company I worked for got a contract with a presidential campaign to image contribution checks for federal election commission compliance. We were burning CDRs full of check images and MICR data from them. (We were mainly in the bank checking software business mainly. This was a one-off contract.)
Hey, I got to see Steven Spielberg's personal check.
I'm going to ask even though you probably can't answer: how much did he donate, and to whom?
@@AureliusR I don't mind. The FEC maximum at the time was $2000 and that's what it was. It was to Bill Clinton. It was a joint account with his wife Kate Capshaw. No doubt he contributed more through PACs, but we were working directly with the campaign so those limits were strictly adhered to.
I didn't vote for him.
@@cohort6159 Interesting. That was Clinton's re-election campaign, right? Also, wow, burning CDs back in 1995 -- not many people were doing that!
In all the videos I've seen from you recently, the way I've seen you hold discs in all of them drive me up a wall.
This video got shouted out by LGR as one of the main reasons he hasn't done a video on his Vaio CD changer!
I find this video amusing as the narrative is mostly about trying to use these as data mines. I had one of these back when I was playing Starcraft OG, back before you installed the entirety of games on the HDD. I'd leave the top 6 games that I wanted to play in the CD/DVD drive that way I didn't have to swap them in and out, and the PC showed all 6 drives in Explorer. To say I'd use them now, I wouldn't. But back then, I didn't want to touch the discs so...
So glad you're doing this full time! Keep up the great work!
Incredible, you're actually the person I dreamed up who just didn't want to swap discs! I respect it tremendously and would have done the same if I'd had the money, lmao. Thank you so much!
@@CathodeRayDude hell yeah! I've got you by a decade or more so there's that too. I envy you and your "job", if I can even call it that. Maybe one of these days I'll dip my toes in the water, but until then, you take me down memory road and even teach this old dog some new tricks. Keep it up!
I remember going to the State Library to access the MLA (Modern Languages Association, the definitive index of literature and literary criticism at the time) database on CD-ROM. They ran it on a stack of CD-ROM drives just like shown here. It was the only way to search the database for several million people, and you just called up the library and booked a time slot to access it.
This would have been 1995 or 1996.
I used to have a pioneer music center that used the same cartridges, it was great. Love the videos, your presentation style is really funny AND informative, great stuff.
Brilliant video. Supported a law firm and got to support one of these devices BUT it was 15 single CD ROM drives. Avoiding the lock up you were experiencing. Really enjoyed your video. And reminded me how technology was back then
Such a blast from the past.. I had the home 6 disc pioneer that flashed on the screen when you were talking about the cartridges. Also, the car ones were identical. We had a van with a 6 disc pioneer, and I used to bring one of my magazines from home and put it in my car unit.
Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM was pretty awesome, and used often for Homework. And the pressed warez-cds were pretty awesome too :D
This is the first video of yours that I came across and I really enjoyed it. I love simple long format informative videos that are extremely well written. I look forward to binging the rest of your content.
What made the CD such a big thing for me was how cheap they were for companies to make and send. It didn't matter if the CD only had ~10mb on it, because the fact that it was on a CD that cost pennies meant that they bothered to include it where they absolutely would not have included 10 floppies. Magazines came with CDs that had video clips, game demos, software updates, OS updates, etc. MacAddict, PC Gamer, there were even newspapers that included CDs in my area that had video clips and high resolution pictures that went along with stories. The big boon for consumers I think was the drastic drop in friction, not really the storage. The internet was so slow in my area that the only reason I got to play so many game demos or install any patches for my games was because PC Gamer included a ton on their cover disc.
I remember reading an anecdote from Richard Garriott (aka Lord British, creator of Ultima) that if CD-ROMs had came just a little sooner, Origin (his video game company) might've been able to avoid being bought out by EA just because of the savings in manufacturing.
I rejoice when I see these long form videos! usually watch them in 3 sections, but let the video run the whole length the first time, to let youtube know that I actually like long videos and to (probably fruitlessly) change the algorithm.
great stuff as usual!!
In China around 2000s, Universities use huge CD-ROM libraries (yes, multiple machines for maybe thousands of disks) serving library services (bibliography and full text database*s*, ebook database, even medline search in my medical colledge days).
Back in the ‘90s I was a sysadmin for a major defense contractor. One of the systems I was responsible for was an optical drive library for our graphics and publications department that used hierarchical storage management (HSM). The server had five 4GB hard drives in a RAID5 array, the optical library followed by a DLT changer. Based on the last access date on the file it would automatically be moved from the hard drives to the optical drives and finally to tape and back again, as necessary.
The optical library was a massive thing, about the size of a commercial refrigerator. Ours wasn’t maxed out, having only 6 drives (probably 1.3GB (?) per side WORM or MO drives) and about 128 discs; it could probably store double that number of drives and discs, but ours was relatively minimal during the time I worked there. One slot on the front was used to load the discs, but that wasn’t used often as the discs were never changed unless they failed. There was one robotic arm to pull the disc from the storage rack and put it in the drive. When the opposite side of the disc was needed the robot arm would press the eject button, grab the disc, flip it and then gently reinsert the disc. It was quite a sight.
The HSM method worked well at preventing the Windows issues with multiple people trying to grab different bits of data on the same disc. The system handled one task per drive, dumping the requested data onto the server’s hard drives for user access. It was a great way to store huge quantities of data in a way that was easily and automatically accessible by the end the user, although they may have to wait a bit for the requested file to be transferred to the hard drives from whatever media the file may be stored on at that moment in time. Now that same library of data could be stored on one 512GB MicroSD card - how times have changed.
In late ‘99 I was going through the accumulated junk mail on my desk when I found an envelope from Kingston. It appeared to be more personalized than the usual generic sales garbage, and I was correct. It was a letter stating that I had won 64GB of RAM, a huge amount at the time. Based on that I ordered a brand new, custom built PowerMac G4 - minimal RAM (I had 64GB on the way after all), a 10GB hard drive (the smallest available) the fast 500 MHz CPU and a DVD-RAM drive. I already had an HP 4X SCSI CD-R but I wanted more storage. The DVD-RAM drive did what it said, but the performance was somewhat lacking, although I suspect that this had more to do with my unrealistic expectations. It was slower than burning a CD, but then again, it was burning considerably more data than a CD. I probably never used it in the manner in which it was intended. Later, at another job, we upgraded the Mac servers we used (that were just there to hold the CEOs address book) with top-of-the-line models which had DVD burners. We didn’t need those drives on the servers so my boss told me to put in some other optical drives and we could each have a DVD burner. Heck yeah! That drive, like my DVD-RAM drive, worked great for playing movies via a hardware decoder, something I probably still have; given what I paid for it I wanted to make sure I got my money’s worth out of it.
Even when DVD burners got faster I would still burn at slower speeds for reliability and accuracy. But I’ll be completely honest - I haven’t burned a disc in years. I even have a Blu-Ray burner that I got from a retired friend of mine, but even though I have the media (I bought a 25-pack back in 2018) I have yet to burn a single disc. I mounted the drive in an old SCSI case, converting it to USB 3.0, so it’s not taking up space in a precious 5.25” bay. These days most of my data is stored in piles of 8TB external drives, but even then I can’t keep track of it all; I think some sort of disc cataloguing program is in order, especially if it can find duplicates. I also have literally piles of 500GB drives from used DirecTV DVRs that I would grab for $2-3 each, gutting them just for the drives. I stopped that several years back when 500GB became the modern equivalent of a floppy drive (and I used the drives as such, in an external drive duplicator), and when one of the units was filled with insects, bedbugs in this case, thankfully all dead (I had a disgusting neighbor that infected a building I was living in with bedbugs and I never want to experience that again). You can still find the occasional DVR at the Goodwill Outlet and harvest them. AT&T and DirecTV units work well, but avoid Dish Network units as they have buggered up the drives to make them all but unusable anywhere else. I spent hours tweaking the firmware but eventually throwing in the towel as my time was worth more than the 500GB drive I would have in the end.
I bet some school IT departments have a lot of that software in a box under a bench somewhere. I remember installing LexisNexis and MSDN on labs full of computers in the late 90s/early 2000s at a Community College where I worked.
Considering my ancient R710 LFF cost me $1000 a few years back, and a 20TiB SAS drives sets me back $300, the 40 TiB ZFS array (complete with a 400GiB SAS SSD cache for said ZFS array) that holds thousands of movies and hundreds of full-run TV shows, it amazes me how quickly the whole storage problem got 'solved'. This hardware is ancient, yet the server software driving it is quick and modern, and hits all my devices no matter where I am, provided I have Internet access.
At university in the early -mid 2000s i remember there being a catalogue frontend to a CD jukebox on the library PCs. Youd browse through the list of CD-ROMs in a dedicated programme and select one which would then be mounted on a network share. There were limits on how many people could use it so the session management was basically one user per cd transport i think
Great video. Pleasantly surprised by the unexpected Achewood reference at the end!
Closest thing I've seen to a decent library on a disc was done by Baen Books, Jim's (RIP old man you're still missed) idea which he pushed to authors was publishing a certain percentage of their prior works on disc with the books that were sold, combined with the Baen Free Library it served as a pretty impressive marketing gimmick, as it got people reading some of the authors they knew less and purchasing the novels.
So much nostalgia for me for the pioneer changer cartridges. We had a music version of this and I can't believe you even have the little genre stickers, amazing.
LGR sent me here!
As others mentioned, I know several BBS's used these jukeboxes to provide huge file libraries. They often had limited number of concurrent users, so it would work out quite well.
In 1998 while at UCSF we had a huge CD library that needed to be online because MRIs were huge. We used multiple towers on linux with experimental support. Worked good enough.
linux??? back then??? linux didn’t have good hw support at the time.
@@beepyshenanigans lol what? linux had the best driver support of any unix as far back as 1995. i've been using linux and nearly every for pay unix since the early 90s.
@@beepyshenanigansfor "real" computers in the 90s, the kind of stuff that would run Windows NT4, Linux had decent driver support since this is what developers or college students typically had access to at the time. Support for SCSI was excellent.
oh heck yeah! finally i get to see the other ones! glad to see this video come out of purgatory, hope you're enjoying the new career!
watching this video is like watching gravis live through that episode of TNG where the universe keeps contracting and things that were readily at hand yesterday have not only ceased to exist today but never existed at all
Wesley and his Static Warp Bubble.
I majored in computer engineering and scheduling was one of the topics in my embedded systems class. Scheduling algorithms are used to manage resources among a set of tasks (e.g., CDs among a set of users). It is a complicated problem with many solutions, but the goal is to schedule the tasks in a way that minimizes certain metrics like latency, deadline misses, execution time, etc. Also note that the tasks could be split into multiple parts.
The algorithms we talked about in class included: Weighted Round Robin (WRR), offline cyclic scheduling, Rate Monotonic scheduling (RM), Dynamic Priority Scheduling, First-In First-Out, Earliest Deadline First (EDF), and Least Slack Time First (LST). Some of them assign priorities to the tasks like WRR and others focus on metrics like EDF and LST. EDF is simple enough, as it prioritizes the task that needs to be finished first.
LGR sent me here, too!
In every video uploaded since you quit your day job, it's been really obvious how much less stressed out you are. We are so happy for you!
Who else is here from LGR?
It's a little thing, but I dig how the magazines have physical indicators of which disc is in use. Pretty slick.
That Proliant 8000 in your picture could have up to 21 hard disks with the optional extra SCSI backplanes (my one has 8 X Pentium III Xeon and 21 x 9.2Gb SCSI disks)
I'm so glad you found one of your copies of Riven
Maybe I'm weird, but I'm nostalgic for the millennium styling of the PowerFile with the colorful glossy transparent front that's curved, with the big inset semi-sphere for the DVDs to be inserted into. It reminds me of the original CRT iMacs of the same era, which came in all kinds of colors. I kinda hope this style has a resurgence in the future!
Let's bring back the crazy colors!! 90s curves are superior
I absolutely remembered these from my school. We used them in the computer lab and the library, and they allowed several machines to access things like game disks and encyclopedias without the instructor having to risk us handling CD-ROMs. It also let the expensive computers from before the CD-ROM era use content on CDs (and the CDs were often many times larger than the hard drives on the older machines).
We had a bunch of Mac LCs (the original, not LC 5200s or whatever) that had PhoneNet AppleTalk connections to get to a CD-ROM 'server' via an Ethernet to AppleTalk adapter.
It was cost effective and 'fast' compared to buying CD drives for each machine or having ten copies of each software title.
Not a huge deal but iDVD is the name of the DVD authoring software for the Mac. The DVD player app is just called DVD Player.
Hahaha, dangit, I spent a bunch of time in iMovie last weekend and mixed em up. Thanks!
The name "DVD Player" suits the simplicity of the app. You really cannot do a single other thing with it besides "play DVD" LOL.
Part of me wonders why they didn't just bake the DVD Player functionality into QuickTime? Seems like the more logical choice...
Awesome video! I recall going from store to store to buy out all their writeable CDs, sometimes for as much as $50 cdn each, when I was developing a CD-ROM c++ tutorial at IBM in late 1993.
Those giant Panasonic ones you mentioned, I saw one of those when I was on a tour at Kodak back in the early 90's. They were very proud of the unit which stored something like 250GB in an era when that was just...staggering.
I won't lie the idea of the DVD backup jukebox is still appealing to me now. I know that DVDs are not as long-lasting as the original advertisements claimed back in the 90s, but for things like photos they seem to be pretty resilient.
That is realy cool how it works, neat to watch them physically and mechanically change disks.
This was a really nice trip down memory lane. 😂
As a first year student, writing my first term papter in 1992, on compact Macs in a computer lab, saving the paper on a floppy, it was all bound paper indices of abstracts, and the library catalog was accessed by dumb terminals with green CRTs. At least we could print the catalog hits on tractor fed paper on a pin matrix printer, and run around the stacks to find the bound journals.
In 1997, first year as a grad student, the university had access to services that sent articles by *_fax_* after accessing the abstracts on my PowerBook1400 logged into the library remotely. And since I could receive faxes on my PowerBook, that’s what I did.
These days you get the article PDF, or even the whole book, right away, with one click from the library’s catalog search page. 😊