Still the best no frills digital audio medium.
Even over the mini disc? Blasphemy!
Microwave
I’m going to tell (and show) my kids that’s what “burning a CD” was
They will love it
Especially the smell, lol!
I went to a LAN party way back in the 90s, and there was one kid who had a burner. It was back when they could easily fail to burn, so he had a stack of failed burns for us to nuke all night.
Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn’t actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.
This is part of why you could burn “faster”, although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.
I am very, very old.
“Floppy disks” were 8 inches a side in my youth and went in the minicomputer
Then along came Newfangled desktop PCs with their 5.25" floppies
Tom Bombadil remembers first acorn and first rain drop
I used those big floppy disks with some ancient hardware for running physics experiments during university in like 2015-ish, and I’m sure that exact floppy is still in use today. It’s not even a small and underfunded university or anything.
Nerd alert!
As the owner of a CD burner so old there was no speed to note, and later upgraded to a 4x burner…
I’m also quite old it seems.
Edited to add: I bought it at a computer show. The kind that you showed up to in person and paid like $5 to get into. I also bought a used laser 128.
I had to explain what a CD was to my kids the other day because I saw a CD-ROM mirror and decided to get one. We didn’t even cover what “burning” one was.
postapocalypse looking kinda cozy
What I miss most is burning
.cuefiles with hidden tracks; you just don’t get the same high from streaming services.
