Collaborate Disseminate
These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a …read more Continue reading Why Did Early CD-ROM Drives Rely On Awkward Plastic Caddies?
In the innocent days of the early 90s the future of personal computing still seemed to be wide open, with pundits making various statements regarding tis potential trajectories. To many, …read more Continue reading How the CD-ROM Lost the Multimedia Dream to the Internet
Being an early adopter is great if you enjoy showing off new gadgets to your friends. But any new technology also brings the risk of ending up at the wrong …read more Continue reading Reverse-Engineering an ISA Card to Revive an Ancient CD-ROM Drive
When we routinely carry devices holding tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data, it’s sometimes a shock to remember that there was once a time when 650 MB on a …read more Continue reading Burn Pictures On A CD-R, No Special Drive Needed
Robotic arms and actuators are compelling things to watch, and as popular among the maker set as they are crucial to modern industry. [kthod2000] built a design of their own, …read more Continue reading Robotic Hand Uses Old CD-ROM Parts
In an age of streaming media it’s easy to forget the audio CD, but they still remain as a physical format from the days when the “Play” button was not yet the “Pay” button. A CD player may no longer be the prized possession it once was, but it’s still …read more
Continue reading An Arduino And A CD-ROM Drive Makes A CD Player
Sometimes in the never-ending progression of technology, people take wrong turns. They pursue dead-ends they believe represent a bright future, often in spite of obvious indications to the contrary. IBM doggedly insisting Micro Channel Architecture was the future of PC hardware, for example, or Nokia’s seeming inability to recognise that the mobile phone experience had changed for ever when the first iPhones and Android devices appeared.
Every once in a while, that collective delusion grips an entire industry. All the players in a particular market nail their colours to a technology, seemingly without heed to what seems with hindsight to …read more
Continue reading Medium Over Message: A CD-ROM Multimedia Bubble Survivor’s Tale
For more than 20 years, John Scherer’s Video Professor offered instructional videos and discs to make computers accessible to novices. Where did it go? Continue reading The Rise and Fall of the $100 Million Company That Taught America to Compute
The first music played on personal computers didn’t come out of fancy audio cards, or even a DAC. the first audio system in a personal computer was simply holding an AM radio up to the case and blinking address pins furiously. This worked wonderfully for homebrew computers where EMC compliance hadn’t even become an afterthought, but the technique still works today. [Chris] is playing music on the radio by sending bits over the system bus without using any wires at all.
[Chris]’ code is based on the earlier work of [fulldecent], and works pretty much the same. To play a …read more
Continue reading Data Exfiltration With Broadcast Radio And CD-ROM Drives