Your first CD Writer

[Harrison]

When did you first own a CD Writer? And what were your experiences?

For me I first came into contact with CD Writers in 1996 when my university course (computer new media graphic design - electronic visual communication) purchased an external SCSI single 1x speed Pioneer drive connected to a Mac. It was so tedious waiting over 1 hour for a disc to complete.. And the blank cd-rs were £10 each! So a nightmare when one failed.

I finally purchased my own CD Writer in 1998. A 4x IDE HP CDRW. Seemed so fast compared to that 1x drive. Just 18 mins to burn a CD! Wow. I still remember the cost £285. But I think blanks had dropped to around £1.

Writing discs was very hit and miss back then though, on both Macs and PCs. You had to make sure all programs and background tasks were closed before starting, and even moving the mouse could cause a coaster.

Even in 2001 they were still a bit unstable, although much better. And faster with 16x drives by that point. I found Windows 2000 the best. And then the first DVD Writers appeared... but that's another story.

These days you can now buy a DVD-RW for under £10 and burn a CD in no time at all. Although it's quickly becoming an old format, and even DVD is, with cheap usb sticks and memory cards.



Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

 

[LonesomeAmiga]

Same kind of time frame for me - mid '90s.

I used to use surgical gloves to pick up and place blank CD-Rs into a dust-free caddy ready to be burned. The price was indeed astronomical and it was always a complete calamity to have a failure!

I remember the collective sigh of relief when burners began being able to "pause" and continue a burn when they ran low on buffer or some such - as that was the other failure mode early on.

I find it interesting that BluRay burners haven't dropped as much as I was expecting by now - still in the £70 range - DVD burners have been £12 for about 6yrs or more now and I've caught myself burning tiny amounts of information to throw-away DVDRs to give to people, without even blinking (you used to squeeze every last drop of space out of a CD-R) ;-)

(Edit: I feel like I should be on a park bench somewhere - this retro stuff is making me out to be an old codger LOL! )

 

[Nobby_UK]

I thought it was earlier than it was, because :
I thought our first burner was a Philips PCRW404,
which I still have - dated July 1999
(maybe I had an earlier drive ?)
Burt it was defo on a 1200 (+IDEfix97) with MakeCD
and 'Burn Proof' was a welcome addition.

 

[morcar]

My first burner was a HP burner and cost 220 quid. Formatting a re-writable took 2 hours lol

 

[commodorejohn]

We didn't get a CD burner until 2000, when it came built-in with a P3-era Celeron system from Gateway. It was pretty reliable for the time, though we still did have to make sure that everything else was closed. Mostly used it to write audio CDs of different MODs

 

[Sardine]

My first burner was a HP burner and cost 220 quid. Formatting a re-writable took 2 hours lol

same for me but was over £500 back in 1992/93

2x HP ide burner blank cd's where £12 each.

 

[morcar]

My first burner was a HP burner and cost 220 quid. Formatting a re-writable took 2 hours lol

same for me but was over £500 back in 1992/93

2x HP ide burner blank cd's where £12 each.

Yeah I remember the price on cdr's was mental. I used to buy kodak ones 5 for 20 quid from DABS

 

[Cryton]

My first cd-r was a 2x plextor and cost around £400 i think around 94-5 .... and i do remember cd-r's being £5 a disk and crying when they failed

 

[Uncle_Meat]

It was around '95 or '96 for me too, my friend and I managed to persuade the boss of the computer shop where worked that it was absolutely essential that we stay ahead of the competition by being able to offer a CD authoring service for customers. I don't think we actually burned a CD for a customer in the first few months, so expensive were the blanks, but our personal music collection blossomed around that time...

Can't remember if it was a Yamaha or Plextor SCSI 2x, I do remember it being the best part of 500 quid though.. Plugged in via an Adaptec SCSI card on our "beast" PC, a mighty Pentium 150. I can still remember the ritual, the careful handling of the CD, the closing down of all but the needful tasks on the PC, the refusal to let anyone even breathe near the computer whilst it was doing its task, that feeling of "There goes nigh on half a days wages" when it spat out the occasional coaster...

 

[direktorn]

We where a couple of friends in college/high school (Sweden) that invested in a burner ourself, this was around 1994.

We got an internal Yamaha 4x (i think) SCSI internal writer. We payed about 1400 euro for it and the disc where around 22 euro / each!!!

We only had two computer with scsi, my Amiga 4000 with a GVP scsi card and a PC with a cheap scsi card. The PC did not work well, nor did my Amiga *S* as everything was super sensitive to CPU load back then.



I remember a few funny things:

• I "found" a MakeCD registration key that worked well, I burned a CD and after the CD was complete a nice little message sayd "Hey! We noticed your key where pirated so we burned your CD with complete nonsense, just random 1 and 0's - Enjoy your not working CD" - LOL - 22 euro spend "well"
• We mostley burned pc software that we found, Office, Windows 95 and such. We called it "Dr. Zoosk home made" and one of our clients was a teatcher, kind'a funny "here are my homework for last day and here's your cd with windows 95)
• Most of the time we burned CDs at my place as the Amiga where more reliable compared to the PC, but not by much
• I don't think we ever managed to go break even on the investment

 

[Merlin]

OK, so how many of you had a Yamaha CDR-2214 SCSI CD writer and performed the 4-speed hack to it?

I used to have a Panasonic 4 speed SCSI CD-R that I swear was capable of reading a beer mat. It read scratched CDs that no other drive could even see.

I wasn't posh (or flush) enough to own a Plextor writer until quite some time later as they were VERY expensive back in the '90s.

I've still got an old SCSI HP9100 CD writer, although it's not been used for a very long time.

Next question: those of you with SCSI writers, what SCSI controller card did you have?, e.g. Adaptec (common as muck), Advansys (nearly common as muck), LSI, Initio or if you had another brand, let's remember some of the older brands of controller cards.

LUNs FTW!!

 

[direktorn]

My first burner was a HP burner and cost 220 quid. Formatting a re-writable took 2 hours lol

same for me but was over £500 back in 1992/93

2x HP ide burner blank cd's where £12 each.

Only 500?

 

[Merlin]

My first burner was a HP burner and cost 220 quid. Formatting a re-writable took 2 hours lol

same for me but was over £500 back in 1992/93

2x HP ide burner blank cd's where £12 each.

Only 500?

:double

There's some blatant LOLPrice driving going on in this thread...

 

[BrooksterMax]

I had a Iomega Zip 100 (parallel port PC) before I even got a CD writer, sometime back around 1998.

Very good it was too, as most of the Uni PCs had a zip drive, great for downloading my warez ......... and some course work which could have fitted on a 1.44mb disk anyway!

I think my first CDRW was a Plextor IDE drive but can barely remember now but it was the days where you had a separate CD drive and a DVD-ROM

 

[freehand]

First burner was SCSI x 1 speed cost £150 with card second hand "bargain" used software disc-juggler for ps1 games %70 success rate also you had to optimize your system or you would receive the dreaded buffer under run error.

Nothing worse than hearing the cd tray eject before the end of a burn blanks cost the earth.

 

[Exilent]

First up was a philips 3600 series, a one speed ide.
Second was a 2 speed plextor, scsi and the last i put in my amiga is the 8x yamaha which is still in my amiga.

 

[AmiNeo]

Paid around 80 quid for my first one. Think it was a 24x drive. Don't really recall doing anything significant with it,

 

[sneeker]

I used to have a Panasonic 4 speed SCSI CD-R that I swear was capable of reading a beer mat. It read scratched CDs that no other drive could even see.


Next question: those of you with SCSI writers, what SCSI controller card did you have?, e.g. Adaptec (common as muck), Advansys (nearly common as muck), LSI, Initio or if you had another brand, let's remember some of the older brands of controller cards.

LUNs FTW!!

I had a 4x Panasonic, bought it off the same person as my 1200 came from.. he upgraded to a plextor as iirc the Panasonic didnt like doing 80min cd's.

Had it in a p133@166 iirc, plugged into a Adaptec 1542 that wasnt fast enough to burn at 4x, so everything was done at 2x until I picked up a basic version of the 2940 up.

 

[sprcorreia]

First i had was a 1X Philips with a pink button... Very, very expensive drive.

 

[salaxi54]

A Yamaha 4416 SCSI drive was my first experience. 140,000 Drachma around mid-90s, came boxed with an early version of Toast for Mac.
Went straight into the A600 full tower back then, and Toast was actually used through Fusion under MacOS 7. The A600 was my first Mac utilizing the Viper 630.
PS:The 4416 still lives on the Draco nowadays!