After the hours were used up, my brother and I would use the stove eye to slightly melt them and then add them to what became the ugliest, biggest, most non-functional wind chime you ever saw! 😂
I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned it, but as someone who is partially deaf I want to thank you for always including captions with your videos! It's a lot of work to get something like that going even when outsourced, but I can say it does pay off for your viewers.
UA-cam's automated captions are usually more reliable than they used to, I tried it on one of my videos and all it needed was some minor cleanup with capitalisation and doing names properly
@@TroutButter yeah whenever I was bored of the video I watched I'd turn on auto-generated captions and giggle at the results also I'm specifically referring to the captions that generate in UA-cam Studio for your own videos, they're slightly better than on-the-fly when playing someone else's video without captions also also auto-translate will still give goofy results and depending on the language it will probably never be refined due to differences in dialect and culture
not nearly as annoying as when those big dvd/cdrom jukeboxes like LGR mentioned CRD looking at crap out. We had a kenwood unit aas a 200 unit dvd player in the early 2000s. Absolute nightmare when it broke down, because now your whole movie collection is in jail.
I figure if it's truly broken you could take the back off, and either push the trays out from behind. Or take the entire motor part off and just pick them out from the back.
This is literally the comfiest channel on the planet, there is this atmosphere of calm and nostalgia that just disconnects us from the rest of the planet for 30 minutes.
I could totally see a library investing in a set of these to be able to control the discs by the librarian but still put the cases out so people can look at the boxes and bring them to the counter.
Yeah, that was my thought as well: The cases go on the library shelves so that your customers can see what's in stock. Hopefully they'll be descriptive enough.
For years U.K. shops and supermarkets only put the cases out on the shelves and you had to pay for and collect the CD at a counter. In the local supermarket that was the Tobacco counter. Quite cunning as you would realise that a bad CD habit was still cheaper than cigarettes.
@@LGR a direct collab I want to see happen one day ... even though the big pond is in between (Even if it's just doing some puppet skits about old tech together)
Did my dad own TWELVE of the similar DC-300 Media Carousels to store over 1,000 burned Netflix DVDs? Not saying he did, but let's just say that the lending aspect of this software actually DID come in handy when you're the neighborhood Blockbuster! Good memories.
Around 2008 when Netflix still did most of its business from disks, we visited some friends that had moved away and now were working at one of Netflix's call centers. They had some amusing stories from one of Netflix's "Loss Prevention" teams (who they described as "NYC Wise Guys with pinkie rings") that would come into the office very once and awhile. Apparently the Loss Prevention teams biggest thing at that time was to "pay a visit" to customers who were on a "so expensive, nobody is gonna do it" unlimited disc plan. It was originally designed for schools or daycares or something like that, but a bunch of NYC bodegas oddly enough had this plan. Turns out these bodegas were basically reserving "one of everything" and then renting them out to customers for 1/2 of Blockbuster prices, and more than covering the cost of the plan. The LP team would just go, get pictures/video of them running the operation and that was enough for Netflix to cancel their plan and charge them for the outstanding disks, but this "displeased" the Loss Prevention team who really wanted to "teach them a lesson about respect"
I was just thinking that this thing would be a lot more useful more DVDs/BluRays (whether movies or video games). The jewel cases for CDs were relatively compact, but cases for DVDs and BluRays are much larger. You’d need a LOT more space to store 75 discs in their cases compared to CDs.
It's completely useless and take up HDD space on the PC. Its more energy intensive then just having the cd's stacked and grabbing what you need. The only one use case i could see useful is having it set up for quick reference of many items spread over multiple Cd's like documents/personal picture/personal audio Notes. etc. I would not recommend this for the everyday normal user.
@@facetubetwit1444 How much space do you think this archival system would take up? My PC has 4 TERABYTES of storage and that's with no trying on my end. Even 20 years ago this program wouldn't have taken up much space. I've got a better idea: keep your boring opinions to yourself and just let people have fun with silly hardware. Alright, on your bike, piss off.
One of my employers had a system similar to this back in the early 2000's. Used it for disc sharing, and access controls. It was for a civil engineering company that used discs from city, county, and state for embedding in CAD and Microstation drawings. We also tested a similar lending feature between offices to keep track of where a CD went and who had it. We used it for about 2 years. It was later repurposed as a Windows 2003 file server for disc images.
I’m a photographer and would have loved this 20 years ago. I had my media backed up on festoons of CDRs and put in big CD albums which were clumbsy to get out and find CDs when I needed. This is perfect for someone who is backing up data that they want irregular access to from time to time. MY CDRs would be in this machine with that list making it easier for me to find the year of my backup and eject the CD for me to plop in the computer to access it. So I wouldn’t have lots of jewel cases displaced, this would be perfect for my needs back them.
I worked with and supported 100/200/600 CD and DVD jukeboxes from JVC earlier in my career. They had read/write drives built in, were SCSI-attached, and generally meant for data center use before HDD storage became a cheap commodity. They broke down frequently and were a giant pain to use. My company dropped support for them ~15 years ago and I don't miss them one bit. I heard that JVC did release a BD version of their Jukeboxes, but I didn't care about their crappy products by that point, so I can't confirm.
Were they also used by radio stations for computer-instigated playback? I remember seeing an inside view of _Pirate Radio_ (An amusing name for a station that held a legitimate OFCOM broadcasting licence! 🏴☠📜🤣) and their music repository was made of four automated CD jukeboxes (Two columns in each, and maybe about the size of a small fridge) rather than the usual array of CommPak carts. 😇
Pretty sure Gracenote CDDB got bought up, and started charging licencing fees to companies like this, which not only broke everything that was pointed at their servers, but also raised a lot of hackles given that the database was originally user-generated and had originally been intended to remain free and accessible to all.
Somewhat kinda like Wikipedia, Mozilla, RedHat, Creation Club for Bugthesda games and GitHub. All of them are based on open source concepts but they've been hijacked/bought by people who want money and/or power, in varying degrees. :/ Im doing my part by not giving any money for inferior experience, 15+yrs of Linux laif.
@@no1DdC yes. They closed down the discussion forums too, which was a pity, though (especially nowadays) I'd imagine they'd consume a lot of resources to moderate.
One day in the distant future, LGR will post a video, saying, "Sorry, but it appears that I have featured every single odd piece of computer tech ever made. I'll be retiring now, thanks for watching."
@@ferretyluvMost PS3/X360 era games are older now than a lot of the games he reviewed earlier on were at the time of his videos, I think it's 100% fair to move it as time passes.
LGR never fails to bring new old tech and a smile to my face. A coffee and a good video are a great start to the day! My little girl also loves watching your videos too! She gets so happy when she hears your voice lol! She turns two tomorrow so I’m gonna do an LGR marathon for her B-Day ❤
The Bifi Action in Hollywood It's an advertising campaign from Germany in the 90s and it was a huge thing. It is a point & click adventure from the company Bifi, which still produces salami snacks today.
I chukled when I saw the CD : Bifi is also very common here in Belgium, but the Bifi Roll was certainly one of the most savagely mocked food product in the years after its release. Basically the survival food you'll only eat when you are all out of shoes... 😅
@@NQR-9000 This also applies to Bifi without the roll. It's basically an overpriced salami stick that tastes more like the wasteful double plastic wrapping around it than actual salami. Even the texture and chewiness feels highly artificial and not like food at all.
We've got the biggest and best product ever! We've sunk a lot of money into marketing and promise you September 11th 2001 this CD tower will be all you remember about that date! - KDS CEO
It feels weird. When I was a kid, the library near me had a system like this when they were game discs. Somebody tells me this hardware and software were used mostly in archiving at libraries
The year is 2024 and this is exactly what I need. For the last few months I just had all my CDs sitting in piles beneath my desk 😂 finally moved them to an unused shelf on the hifi rack
I've held onto that 2000s habit of backing up files into optical discs (bunch of BDs now added to the CDs and DVDs) and I've printed myself a few little towers to hold both the slim cases and normal ones, but yeah had to buy a lot of like 25 of those slim cases for a bunch of those burned discs that were inside those dreadful CD/DVD holders made of fabric/thin plastic... THAT was a 2000s thing I just don't miss anymore, good riddance! The cases are far nicer and easier to get what I want (...I just gotta ass myself to print the labels already to know what I need instead of skimming through).
I had two of these, they were awesome... Until something happened to the database and i then had hundreds of disks lost in the towers unsure of where they were.
Even in the event of database corruption/loss you should still have been able to eject all of the disks via the software. If that wasn't possible with a corrupt database, maybe that explains why it was also capable of operating in a standalone fashion via the buttons? 😇
@@dieseldragon6756 yes, I could still get them out, but you can imagine how long it took to empty two towers... And how much time I spent scanning the disks and entering information into the software. I guess I should have had better backups, or printed out a directory of what was where ... But as they say, hindsight is 20/20
Thank you for the CD organizer video and I am glad it got some use. By the way the German floppy disk game is pronounced "bee fee". Hope you enjoy it. Keep up with the videos, my hubby and myself enjoy them very much. Have a great day.
@@dieseldragon6756 yes the game was a promotion game ( In German Werbespiel ) from the same company which produces the Bifi snacks mini salami and Bifi Roll.
I remember that my dad had a DacWare - DC-300 Media Carousel Plus back in the day, he kept what disc was in what slot in an excel sheet on his PC, and then you would just enter the number on the disc carousel itself and the CD would pop out. Felt very futuristic at the time!
Looks like a consumer grade version of the disc storage units we used throughout the 90s. Fridge-sized, inter-connectable with other units, room for 2000 CDs per unit. These acted basically as network drives. We crammed a dozen into a small room in our office. Carousel-style system, so it got noisy every time someone accessed resources on there.
@@md_vandenberg Yes, but often not filled to 100% capacity and sorted by category. Kodak photo CDs, stock audio/video/image collections, textures, models; those kinds of things. By 2001 it was all migrated to HDD on a bunch of servers and that was the end of that nonsense.
@@Dr.W.Krueger These basically remained relevant until the point that hard drives became cheap enough to just image this data instead of keeping it on discs.
My uncle had this thing! He would keep all of his games and other random CD stuff in there, I remember him showing me the software catalog he built (he would take the jewel cases and store them in big totes in his attic). What a throw back and walk down memory lane, LGR is the best!
I once had a 50 disc changing CD player that I got cheap from a pawn shop. The player itself died only a few months after I got it, but the ejector mechanism still worked, so I was still able to use it for years next to my computer as a trustee disc organizer/selector. I wish I still had it...wish I still had a lot of things...
In the early 2000’s I purchased an Axis product for the company I work for. What it did was to automatically create a virtual CD version of the disc you inserted, and stored this on a built in hard drive, and it could be reached over the network via SMB share. I cannot remember if it also had more than one CD/CD-RW drives. But I think it could also write a virtual CD to disc again, while not 100% sure on that feature. We used it for a few years to share commonly used driver CDs, factory related technical manuals, application installation discs or whatever we needed to use regularly by a number of people. This video got me reminded of this product, that I really had forgot about long ago. :D
"Bi Fi" is a range of meat-based snack products, mainly thin salami-style sausages. Mascot is a deranged sausage with arms and legs. The more you know!
The Australian retro game streamer Macaw45 became completely obsessed with and addicted to Bifi last year while on holiday in Austria and Switzerland. It was so sad to see another young life ruined by meat-based snacks 😿
That looks like an excellent storage solution for your magazine discs, especially with the database to make your library easily searchable. I employ a slightly more manual solution with all my old, burned discs I never use. A database on my computer that references what storage box the disc is in and under what number it's filed. It's those storage boxes with numbered pockets hanging from rails. While I very rarely use it now, (larger hard drives and faster Internet) it used to be a very handy solution. Actually, it still is, every few years when I want to look something up.
I've just got to say how much I get a kick out of seeing those 3D printed Dukes every so often. My Mother got me the one from the collector's edition (sans game, thankfully) off eBay several years back and it has pride of place atop my XBox to this day.
I find it so wholesome, that the old Tech UA-camrs are just a group of Nerds who support and help each other all the time :) Also I am subscribed to way too many of them
I had an '06 Nissan Sentra with a stock 6-disc changer plus the single disc in-head. Kept my 6 favorite discs loaded at all times for when the radio was boring me.
"Bi-Fi Roll: Action in Hollywood" is a German advert DOS game from 1994 and it's extremely well-made (especially for a free game). Hilarious dialogues and great Point 'n Click puzzle action. I just recently did a Let's Play of that one and had an absolute blast!
This has a strong library feel to it, bring the empty case to the librarian, tippy tap, here's when it's due back, disk comes out, put it in the case, job done.
I had something similar in the early 2000s called the Imation Disk Stakka It held 100 disks and you could stack them on top of each other. Disks were dispensed through a automatic rotating carousel kind of thing.
You know, about the jewel case problem, I wonder if this was actually designed for use with your own burned discs! You wouldn't necessarily have jewel cases for each and every one of them, so I can see one of these towers, along with the database, being incredibly useful for that!
13:05 Well, you wouldn't believe how many CDs, DVDs, VHSes and other stuff I've lost over the decades because I just forgot I let friends and other people borrow my stuff! :P
Brings back memories. I worked at a company that had one of these in their dev department to catalog all of their releases and other softwares where we could use it to check things in and out.
23:05 "These days anyone can do it" That's funny because a few weeks ago I was reading that younger people don't know the meaning of Ctrl C + Ctrl V, because they use most their cellphones
This would've been great to have in 2005-06 for organizing out my Music CD's. As always great work and I would love to see video covering that Sony Vaio Media PC.
By 2005, I was habitually imaging every single disc I was using, including music CDs (for the MP3 player, of course). Hard drives were more than cheap enough so that these solutions made no sense anymore. Even in 2003, the fate of these things was sealed.
@@no1DdC that's fair and I did the same with iTunes. However I imported alot music cds from Japan for anime and games. Those where not available on digital storefronts back then.
trancemaster 3006 is such a niche album that I never thought i'd ever see anywhere, but here we are! I love the library functionality, and i suppose if you had 10+ more of these and a shop, then maybe this would of made sense for DVD rental in stores (in the UK corner stores used to rent VHS/DVD out) Great video as per :)
It's rdiculously smart in a stupid way. it's forward compatibility could in theory allow you to even put blu-ray discs in if you wanted to. I could see this being super helpful if you wanted to have an entire collection of discs but keep the cases in the basement or storage locker. You could even use it for things like game discs. you wouldn't even need a computer, you could keep what's in the box with a sheet of paper and a pencil.
I have been burning disc of all kinds for over twenty years, and yet it was only when hearing you say Nero’s full name at 15:00 that I realised the name’s a pun on “fiddling while ROMs burn.” Wild
This belongs so such a very very brief flash of a moment in tech history. I love it. I'm honestly impressed at how simple it is mechanically, yet seems to be reliable.
@@dv7533 That's the thing: I think HDD data density has exceeded what optical disks can manage in practice. If you can get 6TB onto a 2,5" laptop HDD - And four of those fit into the same 3,5" form factor taken up by about 15 standard optical discs stacked bare - Each optical disk has to have a capacity of 1,6TB to break even in terms of data storage for a given unit of space. 📀 Thing is; HDDs will always have quicker data access times compared to optical disks being loaded by even the fastest robots, so for anything beyond archival applications (Where the optical disks are likely to be more resilient than HDDs over the longer term) HDDs will always win out on performance, especially in business and consumer applications. 😇 Me personally? I wouldn't mind an optical disk file that employed LaserVision-format disks... 📀🏋😁
OMG Gravity Kills. I was introduced to them through Test Drive Off Road back in the day. I used to put that game CD in my CD player to listen to the tracks. I would love a video on games that had CD audio that was playable in regular CD players
I had one of these back in the day! You've unlocked quite a few memories. I think I just ended up playing the same handful of games over and over again, and just memorized which tray numbers they were located in and used the buttons on the device instead of the software.
Oof those rough early FMV clips. We were so blown away by that back in the day (especially if you came from Amiga or something). Now they look like most other things that age, not so great.
The LAN Cafe in our town had several of these. They used them so they could keep track of the various games that require CDs. They had like five sets of various RTSs
I love that it says you can have up to 127 of them.. Would anyone need 9525 discs? Also, I love the computer control. Reminds me of when I used to support a recording studio. We had a MIDI controlled mixer with sliders, and it was great fun logging on to the computer controlling them, and get it to move the sliders (these were motorised in the mixer) when talking to someone who didn't really know the studio. It freaked some people out..
seems like a system a government would use in the 90s before hard drives got into the 10s of gigabytes, tape backups were around but i could see this being more of an instantaneous system for a specific program/file.
In the late ‘00s I went to a gaming cafe that used two or three of the carousel style machines to store and keep track of the console disks. It was pretty slick.
I like the fact you can scan per file. So if you wanted to search for backups of word documents, etc, it could locate them for you. That's really neat to be honest. Actually better than the current windows 11 search!!
I definitely had one of these when I was growing up. The look of it is so nostalgic to me, although I can't recall ever seeing it in use. I kept all of my JumpStart and Reader Rabbit games in a much simpler disc storage solution. I wonder if my dad got much use out of this, or if it really just collected dust by the printer as my memories suggest. Great work as always Clint!
"While the RSPB is a charity, of course, but hardly the tweeds and green woolies brigade." I suppose that latter part made sense in the 1990s, at least to someone. A jumble sale takedown, maybe?
Congratulations on 15 years on UA-cam Clint! This video reminds me why I got into your channel, fun, odd devices I have never heard of, oh and thrifting! Thanks to Flo for this too, thought I'd dreamt this CD changer up!
This would have been a great device for a school library. Keep the cases out for students to browse through, but keep the discs in one or many of these. Also, I loved the show Viper. You pulling out random cds made me want to be your friend even more. Lol
We used one of those when I worked for university IT, used it to loan out discs to users for them to install software. Spent loads of time trying to keep it running on windows 7 for some reason 😂
at the end around 25:33 it reminded me of the start of the movie Hackers with Johnny Lee Miller & Angelina Jolie. He hacks into a local tv network and has the tapes pulled to watch his favorite shows
In my Amiga and early PC Time (yes you could use and even burn CD's with an Amiga Computer) I would've loved this tower for all the Data Backups and Magazin CD's I've had.
Regarding the Bi - Fi Roll- I don‘t know if you have this in the us, but in Germany its a shelf stable snack salami sausage in a bun, sold at gas stations. Great Video as always! Hope you will not only feature CRD but maybe do a colab ❤
@@LGR for real?? That’s pretty damn good. My first thought was “Wow, he does a pretty good British accent!” but I guess you do it TOO good to be believable. I believe you tho, bro. I do. 🙋🏻♂️
We had one of these at the highschool I went too, I was like a tech support student [free PE credit that didnt suck] and we used the library functions to check out discs for people.
Finally somewhere to keep track of all your AOL trial disc's that you didn't already try throwing against a wall!
After the hours were used up, my brother and I would use the stove eye to slightly melt them and then add them to what became the ugliest, biggest, most non-functional wind chime you ever saw! 😂
I used to use those ISP CD's as drinks coasters 😂
I still have some of the diskettes - almost all of them have some bad sectors on them, they were the cheapest diskettes.
frisbee's, coasters, or wall art
@@cmdraftbrn I thumb tacked them to my bedroom ceiling as a teen
We need to crowdsource finding 126 more of these to send in so we can see the beauty of having 127 all hooked together!
Populating each one to its full capacity sounds like a dream job!
Anyone got 9,525 disks?
I wonder what the limiting thing was to stop at 127
Also, to create a transparent case for it (so you can see how it works like in the end of the video)
@@Broken_robot1986 USB bus perhaps
I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned it, but as someone who is partially deaf I want to thank you for always including captions with your videos! It's a lot of work to get something like that going even when outsourced, but I can say it does pay off for your viewers.
It's my pleasure to provide them!
UA-cam's automated captions are usually more reliable than they used to, I tried it on one of my videos and all it needed was some minor cleanup with capitalisation and doing names properly
@@LGR I think I've said it before, but I'm another who appreciates the customized captions as well!
@@Zippy_Zolton I actually miss when YT's captions were horribly bad. It made for some hilarious times.
@@TroutButter yeah whenever I was bored of the video I watched I'd turn on auto-generated captions and giggle at the results
also I'm specifically referring to the captions that generate in UA-cam Studio for your own videos, they're slightly better than on-the-fly when playing someone else's video without captions
also also auto-translate will still give goofy results and depending on the language it will probably never be refined due to differences in dialect and culture
Man imagine if that thing died on you, and you had to take it apart to get back your 75 discs
My first thought too!
Judging by how flimsy it looks it wouldn’t be _very_ problematic…
I dont think that there is any lock on the slides so you can just pull them out by hand.
not nearly as annoying as when those big dvd/cdrom jukeboxes like LGR mentioned CRD looking at crap out. We had a kenwood unit aas a 200 unit dvd player in the early 2000s. Absolute nightmare when it broke down, because now your whole movie collection is in jail.
I figure if it's truly broken you could take the back off, and either push the trays out from behind. Or take the entire motor part off and just pick them out from the back.
i can't believe I've been watching this channel for like 15 years and its still so damn good.
The culture, is damn good.
I can't believe I can actually remember all of these "retro" hardware and oddware when they were brand new 😂 Time flies eh.
I cant believe i only discovered this channel two months ago and have almost watched every episode. sigh. help me.
This is literally the comfiest channel on the planet, there is this atmosphere of calm and nostalgia that just disconnects us from the rest of the planet for 30 minutes.
Clint ages like wine
I could totally see a library investing in a set of these to be able to control the discs by the librarian but still put the cases out so people can look at the boxes and bring them to the counter.
Yeah, that was my thought as well: The cases go on the library shelves so that your customers can see what's in stock. Hopefully they'll be descriptive enough.
For years U.K. shops and supermarkets only put the cases out on the shelves and you had to pay for and collect the CD at a counter. In the local supermarket that was the Tobacco counter. Quite cunning as you would realise that a bad CD habit was still cheaper than cigarettes.
that techmoan mug tho
flippin 'eck
@@LGR a direct collab I want to see happen one day ... even though the big pond is in between (Even if it's just doing some puppet skits about old tech together)
nice
Hoped someone else would notice it, i noticed it immediately
@@dolbyman they did in the cassette tape winders video
Did my dad own TWELVE of the similar DC-300 Media Carousels to store over 1,000 burned Netflix DVDs? Not saying he did, but let's just say that the lending aspect of this software actually DID come in handy when you're the neighborhood Blockbuster! Good memories.
*Allegedly* officer🤭
burned dvds is how we shared games and stuff around before usb sticks got cheap
Around 2008 when Netflix still did most of its business from disks, we visited some friends that had moved away and now were working at one of Netflix's call centers. They had some amusing stories from one of Netflix's "Loss Prevention" teams (who they described as "NYC Wise Guys with pinkie rings") that would come into the office very once and awhile. Apparently the Loss Prevention teams biggest thing at that time was to "pay a visit" to customers who were on a "so expensive, nobody is gonna do it" unlimited disc plan. It was originally designed for schools or daycares or something like that, but a bunch of NYC bodegas oddly enough had this plan. Turns out these bodegas were basically reserving "one of everything" and then renting them out to customers for 1/2 of Blockbuster prices, and more than covering the cost of the plan. The LP team would just go, get pictures/video of them running the operation and that was enough for Netflix to cancel their plan and charge them for the outstanding disks, but this "displeased" the Loss Prevention team who really wanted to "teach them a lesson about respect"
Hey did you see that CD organizer thing they release... OH GOD THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
Jet fuel can't melt CD-ROMs!!
A second disc has hit the tower
turn on the tv; doesn't matter what channel 😭
Uh oh. Another soft, doughy manchild
Zangief: “Quick change the channel” 📺
This looks like a nightmare for pressed discs but a godsend for burned discs
The idea of having something like this in the library sounds pretty cool. Like an early 2000's self checkout for movies. Lol
I was just thinking that this thing would be a lot more useful more DVDs/BluRays (whether movies or video games). The jewel cases for CDs were relatively compact, but cases for DVDs and BluRays are much larger. You’d need a LOT more space to store 75 discs in their cases compared to CDs.
It's completely useless and take up HDD space on the PC. Its more energy intensive then just having the cd's stacked and grabbing what you need. The only one use case i could see useful is having it set up for quick reference of many items spread over multiple Cd's like documents/personal picture/personal audio Notes. etc. I would not recommend this for the everyday normal user.
@@facetubetwit1444did we ask if you'd recommend it for specific users?
@@facetubetwit1444 How much space do you think this archival system would take up? My PC has 4 TERABYTES of storage and that's with no trying on my end. Even 20 years ago this program wouldn't have taken up much space.
I've got a better idea: keep your boring opinions to yourself and just let people have fun with silly hardware. Alright, on your bike, piss off.
@@facetubetwit1444 Everyday normal user just uses a phone nowadays.
One of my employers had a system similar to this back in the early 2000's. Used it for disc sharing, and access controls. It was for a civil engineering company that used discs from city, county, and state for embedding in CAD and Microstation drawings. We also tested a similar lending feature between offices to keep track of where a CD went and who had it. We used it for about 2 years. It was later repurposed as a Windows 2003 file server for disc images.
So happy to see a shout out to @CathodeRayDude - that's an excellent channel that has been under the radar for too long!
Just wish he’d learn to pronounce “register” correctly. (He uses a hard G like “guitar” instead of a soft G like “genius”.)
Too right, his stuff is really good, right up there with Technology Connections and a number of other outstanding channels as well
My favourite 3 channels mentioned in on place!!
Cathode Ray Dude
Tech Connections
AND LGR
I’m a photographer and would have loved this 20 years ago. I had my media backed up on festoons of CDRs and put in big CD albums which were clumbsy to get out and find CDs when I needed. This is perfect for someone who is backing up data that they want irregular access to from time to time. MY CDRs would be in this machine with that list making it easier for me to find the year of my backup and eject the CD for me to plop in the computer to access it. So I wouldn’t have lots of jewel cases displaced, this would be perfect for my needs back them.
For the record, on the software end this is exactly what NeoFinder (formerly CDFinder) does.
14:10 I love the description of VCDs " VCD - Video CDs popular in the Far East, Essentially data files"
I worked with and supported 100/200/600 CD and DVD jukeboxes from JVC earlier in my career. They had read/write drives built in, were SCSI-attached, and generally meant for data center use before HDD storage became a cheap commodity. They broke down frequently and were a giant pain to use. My company dropped support for them ~15 years ago and I don't miss them one bit. I heard that JVC did release a BD version of their Jukeboxes, but I didn't care about their crappy products by that point, so I can't confirm.
Were they also used by radio stations for computer-instigated playback? I remember seeing an inside view of _Pirate Radio_ (An amusing name for a station that held a legitimate OFCOM broadcasting licence! 🏴☠📜🤣) and their music repository was made of four automated CD jukeboxes (Two columns in each, and maybe about the size of a small fridge) rather than the usual array of CommPak carts. 😇
Pretty sure Gracenote CDDB got bought up, and started charging licencing fees to companies like this, which not only broke everything that was pointed at their servers, but also raised a lot of hackles given that the database was originally user-generated and had originally been intended to remain free and accessible to all.
Isn't that also what happened to imdb?
I think I remember that, yeah...
Somewhat kinda like Wikipedia, Mozilla, RedHat, Creation Club for Bugthesda games and GitHub.
All of them are based on open source concepts but they've been hijacked/bought by people who want money and/or power, in varying degrees. :/
Im doing my part by not giving any money for inferior experience, 15+yrs of Linux laif.
@@no1DdC yes. They closed down the discussion forums too, which was a pity, though (especially nowadays) I'd imagine they'd consume a lot of resources to moderate.
One day in the distant future, LGR will post a video, saying, "Sorry, but it appears that I have featured every single odd piece of computer tech ever made. I'll be retiring now, thanks for watching."
Depend how fast he goes .He has been posting things since 15 years, so things that were brand new when he started might appears odd and obsolete now.
@@Tigrou7777 So if he paces himself, he'll never run out of oddities!
Nah, he’ll just be doing what Nostalgia Critic and AVGN have done: move their cutoff date and start reviewing newer and newer stuff.
@@ferretyluvMost PS3/X360 era games are older now than a lot of the games he reviewed earlier on were at the time of his videos, I think it's 100% fair to move it as time passes.
Nah, he'll just keep reviewing Sims 4 Addons, that will never dry up.
LGR never fails to bring new old tech and a smile to my face. A coffee and a good video are a great start to the day! My little girl also loves watching your videos too! She gets so happy when she hears your voice lol! She turns two tomorrow so I’m gonna do an LGR marathon for her B-Day ❤
Wishing her a happy birthday tomorrow
Happy birthday to your daughter!
The Bifi Action in Hollywood It's an advertising campaign from Germany in the 90s and it was a huge thing. It is a point & click adventure from the company Bifi, which still produces salami snacks today.
this game ... childhood memories :D
As a British viewer who's familiar with Bi-Fi, I have to wonder if that game was the _wurst_ to ever hit the German shareware market?... 🌭🇩🇪🙃
I chukled when I saw the CD : Bifi is also very common here in Belgium, but the Bifi Roll was certainly one of the most savagely mocked food product in the years after its release. Basically the survival food you'll only eat when you are all out of shoes... 😅
... and of course it's pronounced like "beefy", because that's what it's supposed to be the germanized spelling for it.
@@NQR-9000 This also applies to Bifi without the roll. It's basically an overpriced salami stick that tastes more like the wasteful double plastic wrapping around it than actual salami. Even the texture and chewiness feels highly artificial and not like food at all.
We've got the biggest and best product ever! We've sunk a lot of money into marketing and promise you September 11th 2001 this CD tower will be all you remember about that date! - KDS CEO
That definitely aged like milk 🥛
People were searching for "towers" on that day.
😂 so messed up, brilliant!
@@emeraedbruh 😂
Please don't say the word tower
A 3 6 Mafia album was the last thing I thought Clint would have
Imagine Clint yelling like juicy j, "shutdafuqup!!"
Pleasantly surprised to see Gravity Kills though. Dunno if I've heard them played _anywhere_ since the '90s!
Half on a sack
It feels weird. When I was a kid, the library near me had a system like this when they were game discs. Somebody tells me this hardware and software were used mostly in archiving at libraries
The year is 2024 and this is exactly what I need. For the last few months I just had all my CDs sitting in piles beneath my desk 😂 finally moved them to an unused shelf on the hifi rack
I've held onto that 2000s habit of backing up files into optical discs (bunch of BDs now added to the CDs and DVDs) and I've printed myself a few little towers to hold both the slim cases and normal ones, but yeah had to buy a lot of like 25 of those slim cases for a bunch of those burned discs that were inside those dreadful CD/DVD holders made of fabric/thin plastic... THAT was a 2000s thing I just don't miss anymore, good riddance! The cases are far nicer and easier to get what I want (...I just gotta ass myself to print the labels already to know what I need instead of skimming through).
I had two of these, they were awesome... Until something happened to the database and i then had hundreds of disks lost in the towers unsure of where they were.
Even in the event of database corruption/loss you should still have been able to eject all of the disks via the software. If that wasn't possible with a corrupt database, maybe that explains why it was also capable of operating in a standalone fashion via the buttons? 😇
@@dieseldragon6756 yes, I could still get them out, but you can imagine how long it took to empty two towers... And how much time I spent scanning the disks and entering information into the software. I guess I should have had better backups, or printed out a directory of what was where ... But as they say, hindsight is 20/20
My app was buggy, too. Same thing as it was the time wasted taking all my disks out. I never went back since all the time was wasted.
I had one as a kid and yep that brings back memories
Thank you for the CD organizer video and I am glad it got some use.
By the way the German floppy disk game is pronounced "bee fee". Hope you enjoy it.
Keep up with the videos, my hubby and myself enjoy them very much.
Have a great day.
Thank you again for sending it over!
Ehrenmann
😂✌️
@@googleBot89 your name fits you so well bestie :3
_Frage:_ Was that „Beefy“ game produced by the company that offered the snack roll of the same name? 🌭🇩🇪😇
@@dieseldragon6756 yes the game was a promotion game ( In German Werbespiel ) from the same company which produces the Bifi snacks mini salami and Bifi Roll.
I remember that my dad had a DacWare - DC-300 Media Carousel Plus back in the day, he kept what disc was in what slot in an excel sheet on his PC, and then you would just enter the number on the disc carousel itself and the CD would pop out. Felt very futuristic at the time!
Looks like a consumer grade version of the disc storage units we used throughout the 90s. Fridge-sized, inter-connectable with other units, room for 2000 CDs per unit. These acted basically as network drives. We crammed a dozen into a small room in our office. Carousel-style system, so it got noisy every time someone accessed resources on there.
TWO THOUSAND DISCS?!
@@md_vandenberg
Yes, but often not filled to 100% capacity and sorted by category. Kodak photo CDs, stock audio/video/image collections, textures, models; those kinds of things. By 2001 it was all migrated to HDD on a bunch of servers and that was the end of that nonsense.
@@Dr.W.Krueger These basically remained relevant until the point that hard drives became cheap enough to just image this data instead of keeping it on discs.
My uncle had this thing! He would keep all of his games and other random CD stuff in there, I remember him showing me the software catalog he built (he would take the jewel cases and store them in big totes in his attic). What a throw back and walk down memory lane, LGR is the best!
I once had a 50 disc changing CD player that I got cheap from a pawn shop. The player itself died only a few months after I got it, but the ejector mechanism still worked, so I was still able to use it for years next to my computer as a trustee disc organizer/selector. I wish I still had it...wish I still had a lot of things...
those things can't be brought back and if you did find them, it wouldn't be the same. Be strong and go along!
Lol
In the early 2000’s I purchased an Axis product for the company I work for. What it did was to automatically create a virtual CD version of the disc you inserted, and stored this on a built in hard drive, and it could be reached over the network via SMB share. I cannot remember if it also had more than one CD/CD-RW drives. But I think it could also write a virtual CD to disc again, while not 100% sure on that feature. We used it for a few years to share commonly used driver CDs, factory related technical manuals, application installation discs or whatever we needed to use regularly by a number of people. This video got me reminded of this product, that I really had forgot about long ago. :D
CRD. Tech Moan and LGR, my favourite youtubers
I think in your list is Technology Connections missing 😢
@@MrPunker0007AKA The Internet’s Weird Appliance Guy.
And The 8-Bit Guy for new old games and too much retrobirght
This man could narrate a phone book and I’d listen
@phoenix71232 Don't do that to us, lol
@@jr2904 Don't do that.
Don't give me hope.
Nice Three 6 Mafia album. I don't know why, but never thought Clint would be a Memphis rap fan. Neat!
I said the same thing! Haha. I had to check the comments to see who else noticed that.
"Bi Fi" is a range of meat-based snack products, mainly thin salami-style sausages. Mascot is a deranged sausage with arms and legs. The more you know!
They're called "Pepperami" in the UK, same mascot, the adverts from the 2000s were WILD!
The Australian retro game streamer Macaw45 became completely obsessed with and addicted to Bifi last year while on holiday in Austria and Switzerland. It was so sad to see another young life ruined by meat-based snacks 😿
@@HOXIKKthose adverts with the bloke with a mullet and his colleagues, working in a random company, talking about girls they dated?
@@sandrinowitschM...and the Japanese guy saying something like "going crazy like a school girl". Yeah, exactly that one.
@@HOXIKKIt's a bit of an animal.
That looks like an excellent storage solution for your magazine discs, especially with the database to make your library easily searchable.
I employ a slightly more manual solution with all my old, burned discs I never use. A database on my computer that references what storage box the disc is in and under what number it's filed. It's those storage boxes with numbered pockets hanging from rails. While I very rarely use it now, (larger hard drives and faster Internet) it used to be a very handy solution. Actually, it still is, every few years when I want to look something up.
I honestly think your solution is just as good as this hardware.
18:50 - It's great to see that LGR is a Viper fan. Awesome car TV show from the 1990s.
Having jewel cases on the shelves and the discs in the towers makes sense for large libraries... Or GameStop
Shout out to the Techmoan mug!
Finally a way to organize all the cds I’ve burned working on 90s computers thanks to LGR.
I've just got to say how much I get a kick out of seeing those 3D printed Dukes every so often. My Mother got me the one from the collector's edition (sans game, thankfully) off eBay several years back and it has pride of place atop my XBox to this day.
I find it so wholesome, that the old Tech UA-camrs are just a group of Nerds who support and help each other all the time :)
Also I am subscribed to way too many of them
Look at all those LEDs flashing on the tower! You could use it to light up your place for 8-bit dance parties as a secondary function!
Adrian Black enters the room
When I see the server rack being powered up at work... with all of the disc arrays flashing away, I can't help but grin like a complete idiot 😂
My Sister had a cd changer in her car. I think it was a 8 disc changer under the seat. I thought it was so cool! Great vid as as always!
I had a 6 disc CD changer in my 2001 Firebird and loved that damn thing.
I had an '06 Nissan Sentra with a stock 6-disc changer plus the single disc in-head. Kept my 6 favorite discs loaded at all times for when the radio was boring me.
Long live stepper motors and their one million uses.. :)
"Bi-Fi Roll: Action in Hollywood" is a German advert DOS game from 1994 and it's extremely well-made (especially for a free game). Hilarious dialogues and great Point 'n Click puzzle action. I just recently did a Let's Play of that one and had an absolute blast!
Oh yes it is a really well made game, I played in 1994 the hell out of the game.
@@FlosVintech I wish i had access to that game back in the days! Would have done likewise for sure ^^
The Techmoan mug is the cherry on top in this aggressively early 2000s setup.
This has a strong library feel to it, bring the empty case to the librarian, tippy tap, here's when it's due back, disk comes out, put it in the case, job done.
I had something similar in the early 2000s called the Imation Disk Stakka
It held 100 disks and you could stack them on top of each other. Disks were dispensed through a automatic rotating carousel kind of thing.
Did you paint it red so it went faster?
@@ZacHawkins42 More Stakka!
You know, about the jewel case problem, I wonder if this was actually designed for use with your own burned discs! You wouldn't necessarily have jewel cases for each and every one of them, so I can see one of these towers, along with the database, being incredibly useful for that!
13:05 Well, you wouldn't believe how many CDs, DVDs, VHSes and other stuff I've lost over the decades because I just forgot I let friends and other people borrow my stuff! :P
Brings back memories. I worked at a company that had one of these in their dev department to catalog all of their releases and other softwares where we could use it to check things in and out.
and yeah i worked there during 9-11. crazy!
23:05 "These days anyone can do it" That's funny because a few weeks ago I was reading that younger people don't know the meaning of Ctrl C + Ctrl V, because they use most their cellphones
This would've been great to have in 2005-06 for organizing out my Music CD's.
As always great work and I would love to see video covering that Sony Vaio Media PC.
By 2005, I was habitually imaging every single disc I was using, including music CDs (for the MP3 player, of course). Hard drives were more than cheap enough so that these solutions made no sense anymore. Even in 2003, the fate of these things was sealed.
@@no1DdC that's fair and I did the same with iTunes. However I imported alot music cds from Japan for anime and games. Those where not available on digital storefronts back then.
Transparent case would be nice in this thing
trancemaster 3006 is such a niche album that I never thought i'd ever see anywhere, but here we are!
I love the library functionality, and i suppose if you had 10+ more of these and a shop, then maybe this would of made sense for DVD rental in stores (in the UK corner stores used to rent VHS/DVD out)
Great video as per :)
It's rdiculously smart in a stupid way.
it's forward compatibility could in theory allow you to even put blu-ray discs in if you wanted to. I could see this being super helpful if you wanted to have an entire collection of discs but keep the cases in the basement or storage locker.
You could even use it for things like game discs. you wouldn't even need a computer, you could keep what's in the box with a sheet of paper and a pencil.
I could see these being useful daisy chained as a way to store stock in a retro game store. A cool retro retrevial system. Give the customers a show.
But it's not storing the case or the booklet and case art.
I have been burning disc of all kinds for over twenty years, and yet it was only when hearing you say Nero’s full name at 15:00 that I realised the name’s a pun on “fiddling while ROMs burn.” Wild
This belongs so such a very very brief flash of a moment in tech history. I love it. I'm honestly impressed at how simple it is mechanically, yet seems to be reliable.
With dual-layer DVDs you can have up to 637.5GB on tap. Imagine!
Hmm, i wonder how much of a bitch this would be set up as a server storage.
I have SD cards with three times as much data. Scary
imagine it with BD-XL quad layer discs, almost 10TB total, you can have twice that in a single hard disc now, but still.
@@dv7533 That's the thing: I think HDD data density has exceeded what optical disks can manage in practice. If you can get 6TB onto a 2,5" laptop HDD - And four of those fit into the same 3,5" form factor taken up by about 15 standard optical discs stacked bare - Each optical disk has to have a capacity of 1,6TB to break even in terms of data storage for a given unit of space. 📀
Thing is; HDDs will always have quicker data access times compared to optical disks being loaded by even the fastest robots, so for anything beyond archival applications (Where the optical disks are likely to be more resilient than HDDs over the longer term) HDDs will always win out on performance, especially in business and consumer applications. 😇
Me personally? I wouldn't mind an optical disk file that employed LaserVision-format disks... 📀🏋😁
Why stop there? Dual layer blu ray would get you 3750GB!
OMG Gravity Kills. I was introduced to them through Test Drive Off Road back in the day. I used to put that game CD in my CD player to listen to the tracks. I would love a video on games that had CD audio that was playable in regular CD players
Saw that Leftfield CD and my neurons went brrrrrrrrrr was on of the first albums I bought! Only a few years after its release~ Amazing choice
I had one of these back in the day! You've unlocked quite a few memories. I think I just ended up playing the same handful of games over and over again, and just memorized which tray numbers they were located in and used the buttons on the device instead of the software.
Makes sense, that seems like what would happen with any regular use!
Oof those rough early FMV clips. We were so blown away by that back in the day (especially if you came from Amiga or something). Now they look like most other things that age, not so great.
The LAN Cafe in our town had several of these. They used them so they could keep track of the various games that require CDs. They had like five sets of various RTSs
I love that it says you can have up to 127 of them.. Would anyone need 9525 discs?
Also, I love the computer control. Reminds me of when I used to support a recording studio. We had a MIDI controlled mixer with sliders, and it was great fun logging on to the computer controlling them, and get it to move the sliders (these were motorised in the mixer) when talking to someone who didn't really know the studio. It freaked some people out..
Seven terabytes of what kind of data this abomination should store?
seems like a system a government would use in the 90s before hard drives got into the 10s of gigabytes, tape backups were around but i could see this being more of an instantaneous system for a specific program/file.
I really appreciate these videos. I lol forward to them. They are therapeutic and informative. Thank you Clint!
Dude. Early 2000's and the Tower of Doom. Gotta love those Retro vibes.
no way! had no idea you would be into the three 6. didnt know I could love this channel any more than I already did
[motorized jazz tunes play]
[computer buzzes, beeps]
- Greeting and welcome to an LGR thing
The best way to learn English
In the late ‘00s I went to a gaming cafe that used two or three of the carousel style machines to store and keep track of the console disks. It was pretty slick.
Nice to see something kind of silly that does...exactly what they say it does.
I like the fact you can scan per file.
So if you wanted to search for backups of word documents, etc, it could locate them for you.
That's really neat to be honest.
Actually better than the current windows 11 search!!
I'm happy this video exists, LGR rules man!
I definitely had one of these when I was growing up. The look of it is so nostalgic to me, although I can't recall ever seeing it in use. I kept all of my JumpStart and Reader Rabbit games in a much simpler disc storage solution. I wonder if my dad got much use out of this, or if it really just collected dust by the printer as my memories suggest.
Great work as always Clint!
The Techmoan mug is neat.
Your CD selection is 🔥🔥🔥🔥
RSPB employee over here. Birbs
Are birbs real in your country or are they a conspiracy like the US ones?
"While the RSPB is a charity, of course, but hardly the tweeds and green woolies brigade." I suppose that latter part made sense in the 1990s, at least to someone. A jumble sale takedown, maybe?
Congratulations on 15 years on UA-cam Clint! This video reminds me why I got into your channel, fun, odd devices I have never heard of, oh and thrifting! Thanks to Flo for this too, thought I'd dreamt this CD changer up!
Watching with my one year old son, he loves Clints voice
Awww ❤️ who doesn't!
Was listening to this in the background but my head shot right up when you mentioned where the box came from lol. Racine Wisconsin is where I grew up.
You got me with the Gravity Kills CD today.... Have you played any Test Drive Off Road lately?
I actually have 😄
This would have been a great device for a school library. Keep the cases out for students to browse through, but keep the discs in one or many of these.
Also, I loved the show Viper. You pulling out random cds made me want to be your friend even more. Lol
The Cool CRAB 😎🦀 mousepad is a vibe like none other... Is it an LGR specialty or available somewhere?
We used one of those when I worked for university IT, used it to loan out discs to users for them to install software. Spent loads of time trying to keep it running on windows 7 for some reason 😂
Look at that beast. I expect Bruce Willis to be in there fighting Alan Rickman!
Ho ho ho, now I have a Cd tower
Come out to the coast. Have a few discs!
*"TALK TO ME WHERE ARE MY OLD TEKNO CDS? WHERE ARE THEY OR SHALL I SHOOT ANOTHER ONE?"*
"Well go ahead...show him the connectors. It's a Molex!"
The way you organised those drives I figured you were from the street Al.
In my youth, in my youth....
Okay I'm done
at the end around 25:33 it reminded me of the start of the movie Hackers with Johnny Lee Miller & Angelina Jolie. He hacks into a local tv network and has the tapes pulled to watch his favorite shows
Its like all the oddware from the mail episodes is coming to life!
thank you for all the great work clint, keep it up!
In my Amiga and early PC Time (yes you could use and even burn CD's with an Amiga Computer) I would've loved this tower for all the Data Backups and Magazin CD's I've had.
I just love Rhythm and Stealth; great album !!
Love to see you giving love to Cathode Ray Dude. I adore both your channels.
While in Japan, they scaled this up to use as automated car parking structures.
Regarding the Bi - Fi Roll- I don‘t know if you have this in the us, but in Germany its a shelf stable snack salami sausage in a bun, sold at gas stations. Great Video as always! Hope you will not only feature CRD but maybe do a colab ❤
Thank you Flo ❤
23:26 I swear that “right” came from Mat aka Techmoan, nice edit!
I came here to see if anyone else noticed that. Nice catch. :)
That was my own imitation of the "right" guy 😄
@@LGR for real?? That’s pretty damn good. My first thought was “Wow, he does a pretty good British accent!” but I guess you do it TOO good to be believable. I believe you tho, bro. I do. 🙋🏻♂️
Oh man Gravity Kills! I got addicted to them with Test Drive Offroad!
Please make a video on the Sony VAIO beast!
We had one of these at the highschool I went too, I was like a tech support student [free PE credit that didnt suck] and we used the library functions to check out discs for people.
Racine Wisconsin shout out from here my hometown they probably needed it for Foxconn lol data server …