There was a program call "Nero burning ROM". A pun I understood much later
And now I just got it too lol
E: never let it be said I am not slow on the uptake. 🙄
Core memory unlocked!
I still have a copy of Nero Express on a DVD in my bookcase.
Not that I use it very much - if I ever need to burn an iso Ill use xfburn or brasero or something like that, as I run Linux now. It's more if I need to burn data onto disk's to get it off an older PC.
Adaptec Easy CD Creator. Then I got a copy of Nero from a friend and never looked back.
And these things called optical drives.
You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don't know how to navigate file systems, they don't know where they saved anything, they don't even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn't understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don't even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
"There's an error message on my screen."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
"There's an error message on my screen."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can't count the number of times I've seen an error message that just says "an error has occurred" and you're left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone's app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it's the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like "An error has occurred".
I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said "my computer doesn't work, please take a look" and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:
-
The tower was off but the monitors were on
-
The tower was on but the monitors were off
-
Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn't blame them for this one)
These people were in their 40s and didn't know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say "I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!". After about a month of this I would just say "Hi", press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.
My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn't know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.
Not PC related, but I was a service technician for a company that sold ice cream machines and I had this one call that I'll never forget... This woman has a store built for her, we just came come to train her on how to use the machines (the important bit for this being a switch: day mode and night mode.) When you leave for the day you switch to night mode and when you come back you set it to day mode so it freezes. She calls us saying all the ice cream is too soft and almost liquid. She never switched from night to day... Like it's one step. Only one step. You come in and flip the switch from night to day lol
I felt terrible about having to charge her for it but I had no control over that.
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I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”
It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.
You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.
Back in the early 2010s I was helping a girl at my University's computer lab that I worked at that didn't know how to print from Microsoft Office. Granted it was like a year or so after they hid everything behind that stupid button in the upper right hand corner, but still...
Hell, i run Linux on everything and I hate technology, there are just so many helpful guides and everything is so easy to fix, until it isn't...
So funny story I recently remembed a situation in my early years of running Ubuntu 8.04(I miss the old gnome days), I spent MONTHS trying to get an ir remote to do various things on the computer(play/pause vlc, run apt-get, whatever random shit I thought of at the time) only for the whole thing to never pan out, the recent realization that I had tried to do such a useless thing(it was a laptop) and spent too many night frustrated in tears made me laugh.
They don’t know how to navigate file systems
that's a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.
Dont they also use cloud services that have folders?
“There’s an error message on my screen.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”
"I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I'm late on my project. Can't you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?"
My wife works as a TA at a high school - there are students there who can't even use a PC to do much of anything. E.g. she asked one student to minimise something and the kid asked "What is minimise?".
Even after explaining which button on the window minimised it, they had no idea you could do that. Opening a read only word document melts their brains when they can't figure out how to edit anything lol
You're in the same boat I am. I'm doing IT support and one user couldn't navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used "file open" dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word's open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.
It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn't even try to correct their methods. I was just like, "okay", and moved on.
It's not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things.... Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that's probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow.... They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not "get" that there's a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.
Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.
I hate hearing "I don't know computers" or "I'm not very good with technology" .... You use it every day. There's some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being "bad" with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.
Flashbacks to a few months ago when Adobe Reader pushed out an update that changed how the menu looks and I had an employee freaking out telling me he was "trying to do my PDFs, and it won't let me"... All because the menu didn't say "file" anymore, it was just 3 horizontal lines (and still in the exact same spot...). It took me like 10 minutes to understand what the hell he was trying to tell me his problem was, as he points to an open PDF document and tells me the computer won't let him "do his PDFs"...
I know it's fun to complain/rant about users, but to most people, computers are just a tool. You and I would probably agree that a good tradesman learns his tools intimately, but that's because our jobs are mechanically focused, so it's a requirement. People who work jobs like accountant can maybe be bothered to learn one application well and that's really due to a lack of training or education, you can't expect people to learn secondary skills unless they're led. I've been able to train the worst of users into people that can troubleshoot their own issues, though there are always users that say "idk, you're the one who needs to fix it" because in their minds we're impeding their progress. But most of the time users don't want to call helpdesk either if they can avoid it.
It's always a good idea to practice your soft skills with difficult customers and be compassionate because they don't go away the more you climb the ladder, you just have to deal with them less frequently. Something that someone once told me many 10+ years ago when I was starting my career was that were it not for the users/customers, we wouldn't have a job to complain about.
We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they're connecting to isn't there.
Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn't got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.
Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.
The more infuriating cases were "I don't know, I pressed Enter".
Look at all these rich people in the comments with their car stereos that could play CD-RW. Some of us were lucky to have one that would play CD-R 80% of the time, and it was completely brand agnostic.
I got a Sony CDP once that wouldn't play burned CDs. Not sure if it was a hardware issue with that one CDP, or if it affected the model itself. I returned it and got a different one and it works with burned CDs. To this day it's a mystery
Alright Scrooge McDuck driving your Rolls-Royce with a CD player, any car I could afford to drive still had a tape deck even by the time I had a phone to plug into it via an adapter!
Back then we could pull the factory radio out, and replace it with a new one. And it was easy.
I duplicated CDs for a while for the car, then bought a new car stereo that could play MP3s and condensed my collection onto 3 discs. I left the discs in the car when I sold it
They went that expensive at least by 2000, I put one in my 99' Neon for like 200$. It actually could play MP3 discs! I had one disc with a shit load of songs that was my default disc in the player.
I only ever made like 2 CDs that worked in my life. And I NEVER burned a DVD that worked.
My setup couldn't even do that. But hey I had a tape player...
To be fair, CD/DVD burning peaked and declined extremely quickly in comparison to most other media technology. We went from nobody having a CD burner to most people ditching DVDs for blu ray and/or streaming in what, 15 years?
Burning cd's for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=1995..latest
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
Funny anecdote; my friend's mother referred to the cd burner as "the cd crusher" in the late 90's, I guess it's easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.
Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.
For a short while, you could get CD players that also played MP3s burned onto a CD-R. You could put a ton of MP3s on one CD-R. I had lots of BBC radio dramas on them. All lost now, sadly. And there doesn't seem to be anyone archiving them anymore despite daily dramas.
Don't forget USB sticks and file storage services like DropBox.
CD burning was mostly dead by the mid-to-late naughties. Streaming came later.
USB flash drives took way longer to catch on than most people remember, thanks to how ubiquitous they are now. It took ages for them to become large enough to be worth a damn, for the plurality of computers to be compatible enough to support them, and for them to become affordable enough for anyone other than nerds or businessmen with an expense account to care. And then USB 2.0 just would not gain widespread adoption for what felt like about a century, so even what was available was inevitably agonizingly slow even if it had any kind of capacity.
There was a solid chunk of time between about 1997 and 2006 when a CD-R was not only monumentally cheaper than flash media but was also much more likely to work in any random computer or other device you stuck it into. Prior to about 2003 you couldn't realistically even buy a flash drive that held as much data as a humble CD-R in the first place. In 2004 a 256 megabyte USB flash drive would run you $50 and operate at piddling USB 1.1 speed, but a 700 megabyte CD-R was 20 cents. That helped the CD-R and certainly the DVD+/-R formats to hang on well past their supposed sell-by date.
(And I just checked, since I was morbidly curious. A Verbatim CD-R still costs about 21 cents per disc at Microcenter. Yes, you can still buy them.)
A later large portion of the application for writable CD's was, I'm sure you'll remember, good old fashioned wholesome piracy. At 20 cents each it was cheap and easy to run off a copied CD full of whatever to give to your friends and not expect to get it back. So even after flash drives became affordable, they were never never affordable enough for most people to do that.
The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.
I had a fancy CD/DVD burner in my first laptop circa 2015 and used it very very sparingly. It also had a fancy feature where you could buy special disks that the burner could burn a cover imagine onto. It was crap.
The IPod killed CDs i think is pretty established
There were other attempts, like the Diamond Rio
But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.
mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster
“Lasers”
In fairness to this post, I’m old enough to have asked this same question on the other end lol.
It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.
Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99
50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-52x-700mb-cd-r/p/N82E16817507007
If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW's which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.
The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:
$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell-Latitude-E5420-Laptop-Intel-i3-WiFi-DVD-CDRW-250GB-Win-10-Professional-HDMI/376791632?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=100001344&gclsrc=aw.ds&&adid=22222222228376791632_100001344_153828919326_20723081503&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=m&wl3=679332641651&wl4=pla-2235097983966&wl5=9013636&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=129884431&wl11=online&wl12=376791632_100001344&veh=sem&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_ZhAcoOfd9b3WACPKd_QXPuq3NIZoFnxorRXOK1Xx-CwQz7SO1jSAaAlfhEALw_wcB
You could also write to a CD-R more than once, but you couldn’t truly delete anything (it’d just write to a separate sector on the disc), which would be really frustrating as soon as you could no longer fit your school project on the disc (though, not that it mattered because compatibility of optical media always seemed atrocious anyway… Probably a mix of different versions of PowerPoint or whatever and actual CD compatibility issues).
Yeah there was a point after which it became cheaper for the manufacturers to just make read/write drives than produce both.
Fun fact, for a while they would disable the "write" portion. They would sell the same exact drive one for like 99$ that could only read and one for like 199$ that write. Once the techies found out and it started becoming common knowledge they gave up even selling read only drives.
That's not really a junk computer. That's actually a respectable machine, especially if you use a linux distro.
I suppose not everyone had the hardware to cut their own vinyl, so being able to stick the disky thingy in the bleep bloop machine and make your own diskies at home sounded kind of bizarre at first
As a teenager musician in the 90s, I salivated over the hulking $1k device that could write CDs that lived at the back of the Guitar Center catalog.
Also, the $2.5k Akai MPC for sampling/sequencing.
Now I can do all of this with my phone, but I'm too busy taking a shit before I go to work to stock shelves.
Yeah my mind went right to this. My dad had a few 45s but that had meant paying for a rehearsal space with recording. That was probably the last major medium the average user couldn't make their own
CD-RWs were truly the flash drives of their day
I legit never reused a CD in my life. With how cheap CD-R was, I'd just buy a spindle and burner go brrrrrrrr.
Yeah I didn't either, seemed silly. Re-writing was so much slower too than just straight burning on a CD-R. I still have a bunch in my basement that I may never use up from my last purchase probably nearly a decade ago, lol. I have DVD-R's down there too that I KNOW will never see the light of day, should probably find a new home for them.
I even re-used DVD-Rs. You can format the empty portion on them. I just hate creating waste if extra life can be squeezed out of it.
Rewritable DVDs, though? Burn a movie you didn’t care about, watch it, know you never want to see it again, burn another movie as if the previous abomination had ever burdened your media…
The little DVD burner <> DVD player pipeline these youths know of not.
Actually, that would be the less used DVD-RAM. It had sectors like HDD, and could be formatted with regular FSs, like HDD, and written to like HDD.
We took a magnifying glass and very carefully burned in the 0s and 1s by hand. /s
Good old
C-x M-c M-Butterfly
I'm curious, why link the image instead of linking to the actual website?
Although I realize as I type this that it probably shows as an embed on Lemmy - Kbin shows all images as links
Skips happened when someone bumped your elbow.
No /s, you literally described a laser imprinting a disc with data.
The back half of millennials might not have burned CDs either.
The iPod came out in 2001, my first car I played music with a cassette-tape to aux converter and a first or second Gen iPod, my second through a USB stick plugged into an aftermarket deck I bought from Walmart. Music downloaded from Limewire.
The cassette to aux converter felt like black magic back then. I left mine in so long that it made a creaking and snapping sound when I finally took it out when getting rid of the car.
I went minidisc of iPod, then a Zune.
I still think both were the best decisions of the time, but apparently no one else did.
But I think it was only like 4-5 minidiscs to get the same capacity as the first iPods.
Removable storage will always be a plus
'95 here. I not only burned disks, but we had one of them fancy schmancy monochrome label burner disk drives. So many MS Word font effects were burned that I'm sure I lost 20 IQ points from the plastic fumes.
Man that sounds so cool
Oooh I remember those
I had a 64 MB Samsung Yepp mp3 player super early. Didn't stop me from burning CDs at all, considering the player could only store about one CD anyway.
I’m barely a millennial and I burned a few CDs. But yeah it was only a few and before I got a tape to aux connector for my car
Not sure whether I'm gen Z or millennial, but I definitely burned a lot of CDs. And successfully burned about 20% of them. If even the floor creaked the CD would skip and basically be destroyed.
I may not be the average experience for somebody my age though, considering when I was like 8 I remember using a tape recorder to record my favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette.
Millennial:
Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996.
Gen Z:
~1995~2013Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years.
Now don’t forget it, culture wars are important!
Same lmao. '02 here. I was handed the family tape player and I once used it to record a song from a YouTube video because I couldn't make the computer record itself. I was 12.
I was born in 2003 and I burnt my own CD. But I had a geeky dad and quite old hardware
I remember once Limewire became popular it was almost a magic trick to get a clean install of it. Most people I knew had a copy that came with all the toolbars and malware.
When I was a kid I had two radios.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you'd have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
I had one radio that did all of this but if I didn't hold a fake adapter into the headphone port at exactly the right angle, nothing worked. I put so much effort into being very still to record songs.
I'm sure many of us did that. I would use a plug in microphone and put it up to the TV to record cartoon theme songs. I wish i still had that tape.
I can hear that clock! Omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm
I had one till the flippers broke.
I just saw a post on Reddit two days ago that said "During the 80s, did kids really just go outside and run wild for hours or is that just in the movies/TV?" and the same feeling hit haha
We still did it here in the early 2000s and 2010s, and I know it's still done nowadays where I live. It's easy to do in non-car-centric palces
I remember being younger and thinking 40 years ago seemed like a long time in the past and how old the technology was. For me, that was the 90s, so I was thinking how long ago the 50s were.
Yeah, it's pretty wild. Since I work in tech, I'm into reading old hacker stories and reading about tech from the 80s and early 90s is laughable compared to what we have today. Our first computer in 95 was a Pentium 4 at 200 MHz, 4 GB RAM, and 5 GB storage. We used good old AOL. Now, my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra blows that out of the water. Hell, even the cheap shit $15 burner phone I have is more powerful than that
Growing up as isolated as I was in the 90s, kids playing outside was just something I saw on tv.
As a computer geek, I was always inside too, my parents had to force me to go outside and play.
I remember many years ago when I was going through a box of my burned CDs and games and realized I could just download any of them whenever I wanted. Plus my computer didn't even have a CD/DVD drive any more. End of an era.
I've got a nearly 20 year old cdrom drive that just keeps getting transfered from build to build because you never know. I don't think I've opened in like 3 years... I'm gonna see if it still does real quick.
Ok it does but there was a driver cd for a motherboard I don't own anymore in it.
I keep a Blu ray/DVD burner in a portable enclosure stored away just in case I want to play some of my older games. (I have a smallish retro game collection at this point in a CD rack in my bookshelf, as well as a few boxes copies. if anything it's cool to look at)
Or I need to burn something on the off chance I need to get data off of a really old computer that my grandparents own or something.
I even keep a cd album of turned recovery disk's for various operating systems. I have DVDs for reinstalling windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10, as well as a bunch of Linux live DVDs/CDs just in case. I always try the USB options first, but if they don't work I can always fall back on the CD/DVD. The portable drive guarantees I can use it even on a PC that doesn't have a drive (provided it's not too old - I don't own floppys because I don't have a FD drive)
You had to put it in the toaster while the songs you wanted to record were playing on the radio.
And you could connect your toaster to a pc with the toast titanium app.
even he knew
He really whips the llamas ass... oh wrong program.
Good ol' WinAmp. I remember rockin' out to all the mp3s I could possibly pirate on WinAmp while chatting to all my friends on ICQ. Now I listen to podcasts on Spotify while yelling at kids to get off my lawn and putting A535 on my aching back.
To explain my experience, I need this picture, but with a pirate carrying a copy of him.
Why burn it when you can spin it on a Dremel until it explodes from centrifugal force?
They do fun things in the microwave too
Could You, please, elaborate? I have a Dremel, and I think I still have a CD lying around.
I just bought an external CD/DVD read/write. When I built my most recent PC it didn’t have external bays, and I didn’t even worry about it. Changing my tune.
I have a lot of older games on CD, music files, and movies.
The games I actually own, that can’t be randomly shut off by lack of support. Music files not tied to a streaming service. Movies I can rip and put on my own home media server.
That old tech is still useful. It’s from an age before you “rented” your music, movies (blockbuster notwithstanding), and games.
Yup recently converted back to having a dvdbluray burner once some of my favourite movies were removed suddenly off of a streaming service. Nope. Not letting that shit happen again. At least with blueray and dvds if I do pay, I pay once and I can enjoy it for a life time. I think cd envelopes will be making a comeback since the end stage enshitification has reached all streaming services now.
I don't like this binary choice between "not owning things" vs. "owning them on physical media". You can own things in digital format, y'know? All media I have on my drives is also not tied to some service since it's all DRM-less. I did buy some things on Steam, but for each such game I have a DRM-less version that I do truly own. And a stash of external drives takes up way less space than CDs and is way more convenient to use.
Especially since some physical media also has bullshit like DRM.
You can own things in digital format, y’know? All media I have on my drives is also not tied to some service since it’s all DRM-less
I think they mean that it requires an effort. In particular, for ebooks it requires to be outside the Amazon ecosystem, where they can delete remotely your books if they lost the right to sell them.
I mean I just bought a cd DVD burner. I have a ton of blank DVD and a blank cd to burn songs for my dad. It is still nice to own a physical copy of something.
The only rule was was to use ALL of the 700mb. I paid for that 800k, you bet your ass I'm gonna use it.
I remember trying different combinations of songs on my mixtapes to make sure I got full value.
I still do this when copying files to hard drives for backup/archival. Personally like to call it digital tetris.
Lol not like any of us actually know how it works, just push the button and the magic lasers make it happen 😹
Sure mate, none of us looked up what the laser was doing. It's just magic.
Okay okay a select few wizards must have the forbidden laser knowledge
The boomer in me still remembers Nero Burning ROM 😬
Me but millennial
I found it clunky and cumbersome. Hate on me for not discovering Linux sooner, but on XP, Windows Media Player did the same job more efficiently for me.
I will say, though, I moved away from optical media as soon as I could.
I'm glad I no longer have to be concerned with Nero. But there were many alternatives after a while. This one was my favorite: https://www.imgburn.com/
Do not cite the deep magic to me, Witch.
Might be the only perfect software ever created. It still works. We use at work for burning blurays and DVD for large datasets.
The creater also added tons of hilarious quotes and sass to it.
I used this and CDBurnerXP all the time.
That site hasn’t changed either! Blast from the past. https://www.cdburnerxp.se/
Oooh noooo!
I remember being the first person anyone knew who had a deck to deck burner, it was a Teac, TDK, or a Kenwood, don't remember that well. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time and was bootlegging discs for all of the people in my friends group. Everyone would bring their own spindle of blank discs and we would drink and swap discs until we either went out to go party or until everyone had copies of what they wanted. Eventually I got a few more burner decks to make things quicker, and then I sold off the extra decks to friends before moving away. Not too long after the devices were completely useless as everyone started having a burner built into their PC and just about everyone soon had a PC, still sold my last burner deck for more than I bought it for.
I didn't have a deck to deck, but somehow managed to convince my mom to buy me a bay mounted burner when they very first were hitting stores. There was a local video rental shop, that also rented out PC games for like $2 ea. I copied as many of those suckers as I could convince my parents to rent me over the course of that summer.
A lot of gen z knew/knows how to burn cd's.
This is like those street interviews of x type of person(women, conservatives, gym bros, Americans) that they only show the absolute morons and try to paint the whole group this way.
Honestly so tired of this kind of post
It's getting to the point where I can't help but roll my eyes sometimes.
The fact that so many computers don't even have disc drives anymore almost makes this point completely moot. Most people use smart devices or radios for music now. For me, I like using them because I'm still salty about a crappy CD player that I used to have that loved scratching the ever-loving shit out of CDs. I had a Walkman that used to do that too.
Did anyone ever bother teaching these kids how to do this?
If you don't have a CD player or even a disc drive, you're probably not going to prioritize learning how to use a disc drive to rip a CD. I bet most of the people who laughed at this don't know how to put information on a floppy disc, but that's fine apparently. It's almost like technology ages over time and becomes less popular.
And also some millennials never learned how to do it... There's always been people alive who don't know how to burn cds...
And then there are some cough some of my classmates cough that barely know how to save a word document to a different location other than the default documents folder or how to full screen a presentation quickly (i.e. not having to go to that tab and then clicking full screen, the faster way just just to click F12 (idk rn if that's the correct one) or the shortcut in bottom right)
I could never imagine them working out how to put files on a CD, bet they don't know how an optical drive looks like, and funniest thing is, every singe one that had problems like this was an iPhone user, just shows how technologically uneducated the average iPhone user is (as you can guess I do not live in the US, and not like I live in a wealthy country, I do still live in Europe though)
barely know how to save a word document to a different location other than the default documents folder or how to full screen a presentation quickly
I was in IT support and I was seriously asked to "support" a (l)user that wanted me to let her know where was a Word document she had saved a few minutes prior. Flabbergasted, I just could ask "didn't you check where did you put it when you save it?" Her answer: "What do I know about that? I didn't study computer sciences." 🤦♂️
Y'all remember Nero?
It was the program you pirate before pirating a bunch of others.
😂 man, I feel old now.
Alcohol
120%!
Daemon Tools.
CD Burner XP was better, IMO.
It was a big competition between the two. I always liked Nero.
Only us nerds were doing it. Most people at the time I'm pretty sure had zero clue where bootlegs came from.
Don’t forget to hold the CD and candle close to the speaker that’s playing the song. The closer you get, the higher the volume.
Wait, what? Please explain this to me
It's in reference to the title of the post and they're "playing along"
What?
It was a nuisance, with a high failure rate. Recording to tape was kind of fun. Optical not as much.
I thought the failure rate only went up a lot if you burned at very high speeds? I seem to remember having problems with burning an OS to a DVD too fast.
Depends on your drive and the media. Modern drives in good shape with any media will have like a 90%+ success rate. I don’t think my MacBook has ever had a failed burn that wasn’t because the disc was pre scratched. But older drives, and older media were sometimes a lot less reliable.
Sometimes modern stuff sucks too. The drive in my desktop will fail to burn a CD 100% of the time if I burn it at high speeds, but only because it’s shit and the disk falls of the spindle.
But I’ve got some ancient drives that still burn reliably at their highest speed. Mid 2000s was probably peak of CD and DVD burning reliability, and that’s why I use machines from then to do all my burning,
Was it high? It's anecdotal, but I feel like I burned hundreds to thousands and had very few failures.
Yea, I'm with you. But I also made sure I bought good media.
In high-school I used MagicISO to rip DVDs I rented, burned them, and sold them to classmates for $5.
Same except it was DVDs from the library, so my costs were lower. You could buy a 50pk of blank DVDs for $10 (or CDs for $5) from Fry's Electronics.
Remember when Netflix mailed DVDs? We would rip and make copies as soon as the mail was delivered, to try to get them back to the post office before 3pm. I think you could rent 3 or 4 disks at a time?
My uncle did this for years. He shared a subscription with a friend of his and ripped thousands of movies and gave copies to the whole family. Damn the 00's were wild.
Edit: Ooh do you remember CloneCD? https://clonecd.en.softonic.com/ I have that lamb icon burned into my brain
Yes! That lamb was awesome. We had the burner that would burn an image on top too, otherwise we used the sticky labels. Made tons of "mixtapes" to play in the car as we didn't have an aux. The radio things we tried to use with an mp3 player were awful and we gave up on that nonsense.
I remember doing this a few times with "Mac the Ripper" on macOS
That was one of the reasons why movie DVDs started having bigger sizes that the ones defined for DVD[+-]R and DVD-RW... and someone created a program to rip and compress or edit the content prior to saving a new DVD. Good times :-D
Netflix has existed for 25 years 😳 I was listening to some the other day and someone mentioned that they started in 1998 and that was a shock lol
CD's? HA! When I was young we copied music with hammer and chisel on a stone disc. And that WAS the actual music!
I like that this would technically be possible using the same principal as vinyl records. I want a record made of stone. That would be dope.
Oh, that was an era.
One of the things I remember most is that cheap, defective or old drives can just fuck up the burning process and now you have a useless disk of plastic you can use as a bad freesbee. I never used the fastest burn option for that reason and still had like 1\40 failed burns 'cause my drive was all cheap, defective and old. With how rarely used they are rn, the price of such failure can grow pretty quick. Some of my relatives in the 00s used them as holiday decorations, wall-mounted them on a string as they are shiny and reflective. Although cringe, it's a little better than just throwing them in a dumpster, I guess.
If you put them in the microwave for a few seconds they get this cool crackle effect on the shiny side. If you've got one of those old "skip repair" doohickeys that buffed it in a radial pattern that's nice too. Keep some plain for a nice contrast.
I have no idea what these "CDs" folks are talking about are.
Excuse me while I pop in my 8-track
Look at this time traveller having an 8-track like that's affordable to the common people. What's next, you have one in your car, too? Like this is Walt Fucking Disney's Tomorrowland? Preposterous this sci-fi stuff.
Look at Grandpa over here with his wax cylinders
CDs? I remember tapes.
God I used to hate DJ's that would talk up to the post. Used to record all my music from the air from the late night DJ's because they would often just queue up a few songs with no talking.
I was behind a kid in Chipotle last week that had an honest to god Walkman on him with the original headphones. it seemed WAY larger than I remembered.
I remember giving the joystick port on my C64 a wet willy to activate cheat mode on a game. No, I'm not making that up.
Lmao I had a walkman, and I remember that the less power the batteries had, the slower the tape played. Sometimes I didn't even knew if the song was playing at full speed.
Ah, double decks with high speed copy...
Me explaining minidisc to a 20 something cashier at the pawn brokers.
you had a tiny needle and a little hammer, and you would look through a jeweler's loupe to see where to carve in the 1s and the 0s. It was a golden age.
If you ever tried to burn way too many songs to a CD and got frustrated that it didn't work... it's time to stretch your back.
I still get frustrated at this to this day lol
Sometimes you had to burn them at like 1x instead of like 10x so even the oldest, shittiest players could read them. That was painful .
I remember feeling like a wizard when I discovered the MP3 CD format and the 100+ songs you could fit on a single disc.
Yeah I'm not gonna lie this is me. I've burned iso's to CDs before but I really not get it. The cds I had could only be burned once and then got write protected and I didn't know how to undo to. I'm just gonna stick with my flash drives
They're not "write-protected", they're literally a write-once medium. The name "burner" isn't a metaphore, that's actually what they do.
Tbf there are absolutely rewritable CDs and DVDs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-RW
Though compatibility with regular players was a bit of a crapshoot.
Oh haha, I didn't know that
Flash drives are definitely better than burning ISOs to disc, but don't forget that we had CD-RW discs that allowed multiple burns.
Just in case you don't already know this: of you're frequently fiddling with ISO files on a flash drive, go check out Ventoy! It lets you put multiple iso files directly on the drive and will offer a boot menu of which one to use. It's brilliant. Plus you can still use the rest of the space on the stick for regular storage as usual.
Just lol
CD-R vs CD-RW.
One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they're absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don't think a single disk survived that year.
I also remember when my school got a fancy new "computer lab" that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.
"DON'T OPEN THE DOOR!"
Continues to open the door and snap it shut until the little spring breaks and the door comes off it's rails
Do you mean 5-1/4" ? While 7" did exist they were extremely rare outside of research academia/business and even then fairly rare. The main stream computers like the Apple IIe (in 82' ?) Came with 5-1/5" floppies. The IIe, being an extremely popular public school choice.
8 inch were the old machines - 1970s. 5.25" came in the early '80s
I always felt super cool because I had Lightscribe disks
To us people using sharpies... You were basically the Fonz.
it is a lost art now, I still have an unopened box of DVDs... Somewhere.
I have very fond memories setting up the candle and tuning the laser prism just right, following Razor 1911 instructions to set everything up correctly. While trying not to burn a hole in the walls of the house.
That box of dvds is your 99 potions left after beating the game
I remember getting a stack of unburned DVDs as a present.
it is a lost art now, I still have an unopened box of DVDs… Somewhere.
Same here. And a folder full of CD/DVD backups of old software.
I used to rip and burn CDs all the time when I was a teenager, and in truth.... I dont know.
Gotta make sure it's an RW so you can change up your music every so often!
If you get an mp3 cd player, you can have hundreds of songs on a CD! Hundreds!
The original budget MP3 player: a handful of MP3 CDs.
It’s in the name. You just use a match.
I tried that when I was 4 or so. When they said they're burning it, I wanted to try it too.
This is fake because "burning" is a CD specific term, and no real Gen Z would know that you "burn" a CD to put music on it.
Most would probably just assume it works like a USB stick or any regular digital storage format.
It's like how a hilariously large amount of people don't know what the origin of "mixtape" is. They think its just a word that defines music mixes, because no one knows what a cassette player is anymore, or that people actually used to create and sell mixtapes.
Fuck, some of the younger rappers actually put out mixtape cassettes now. There's a fairly brisk but low demand market for not only used tapes, but there's bands releasing them im special editions.
I'm kinda regretting dumping some of my old tapes. I kept the stuff that's impossible to replace (local bands mostly), but I sometimes get nostalgic for the liners. Not the sound being shitty, or how fast tapes wear out, or anything else about the format, but there was something coool about the way the liners unfolded that isn't as satisfying with CDs, or even vinyl.
Sell? I remember it as how to tell if someone fancied you :)
Do kids these days just make playlists and send links?!
1st question, selling mixes tapes was popular in larger cites. The movie Hackers even had a scene with it (although that may have been a CD).
Not sure. "I think" just sending individual song links in Spotify is the thing.
Or the benefits of that sweet chromium oxide cassette tape...
Have never burned CDs, but I assume I would take our CD player (which i'm pretty sure has a burning mode), plug it in to my computer, and look up "how to burn CDs"
I see you have no idea how this works...
You need a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW drive in your computer, or externally to write to any of those formats. A DVD-RW can write, or burn (because the laser is literally burning the information onto the disk) to all four formats of disk.
Don't forget the + version of some of those formats.
A reasonable guess!
Some computer CD drives (They were called Burners at the start, but near the end most CD-rom drives would also burn CDs) would do it with software. It would eventually be nearly as easy as copying data to a USB drive.
Chances are you could put in a blank disc and the computer will present a folder as a representation of the disc. Copy whatever into the folder and click the burn button on the top right of the folder
Surprised they even know what a music CD is.
I don't know how film is developed and nobody ever made fun of me for not knowing.
You weren’t taught this in high school?
I developed film by hand in elementary school but it's only because I had an elected position that included taking school photos. A staff member taught me how to do it and kept all of the supplies stocked.
Image Transcription: Twitter Posts
alyssa, @tamaranians
Maybe its just the generation z in me but how did people burn CDs? Like how did you just get a blank CD and put songs on it?
Friendly Fat Hottie, @TeriAmour
There are people alive that don't know how to burn CDs. I'm fucking old.
To be frank I am a 30 year old and had to think hard to remember how to burn a cd, and even then. I remember that you just picked the option to burn a cd lol. Remember when you actually needed 2 cd rom drives because images weren't a thing.
I'm about the same age as you and images were a thing. The space of your hdd was probably the limiting factor. I remember ripping and burning DVDs for friends in middle school but it was a juggling act of storage space on an 80 GB HDD
A standard DVD only holds 4.7GB, though?
If you wanted to duplicate a CD you'd use a second drive. What I normally did though was rip music to MP3 then write 100 song mix tapes. Before I could play MP3s in the car I did CD to CD copies :)
It wasn't that images weren't available, it was that 700MB was too much for the amount of storage we had. If you had the storage you could write an image
I used CloneCD. It had an icon of a sheep. Because Dolly.
They must consult the ancient tomes. Or I guess ask one of us who have.
I still have my old CD holders somewhere.
Don't worry, even in Gen Alpha there are some people who know how to burn CDs (in theory), but probably never did, as it is not so widespread now.
I still do it, granted I had to get an external CD drive to do so, but still. You put the blank one in and click "Burn CD" in your Zune software, it isn't that hard.
So we had special disk drives that basically zapped holes in a CD that played music or stored data. That's why we call it 'burning'
And get this: You didn't burn 4000 CDs. You burned one, sent it up to Sony in New Jersey, they cracked it open and then pushed it again polymer en masse to duplicate the CD. They called this "pressing."
Pressed CDs had holes (or "pits") in them. Burned CDs used the laser to change the color of a dye. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as cool as "zapping holes" in the disc.
I never learned to burn CD's cause I had a friend whose dad burned them for us. Not sure if that makes anyone feel old or not.
Candle, pfft I put em in the microwave
The sparks mean it's working!
I'm Gen Z and have burned both CDs and DVDs...
I can't believe that some didn't learn it, especially growing up in the 2000s prior to the iPhone/iPad.
The household tower when I was young had 2 CD drives. The actual computer wasn't much, but boy, do I remember all the burning my mom had me do for her peoples
I wanna get a DVD/CD Rom drive in my PC, not because I need one because honestly it feels weird not having one
I have an external one around here somewhere. I've used it maybe once or twice, but I just like having it.
May I introduce you to the concept of punching holes in floppy disks to make them writable?
Are you old enough to know what a buffer underrun is?
Do you even know how to format a 3.5” floppy?
