1x CD Drives?

[Superewza]

I'm curious as to how they work, i keep hearing that they were immensely different to what we have now in that they used a cable that essentially turned the entire computer into a CD Player. I think i've got a few lying around, and they've got buttons on the bezel for headphones, volume, play/skip and stop.

[snakedoc]

Well, in the "Old" days you used to hook your CD drive to the sound card, still via IDE. You also required an addional audio lead for sound. In Dos it was annoying as you had to load cd drivers and play around with memory settings as all that could be used for programs was 640k. The rest of the ram was held in Ext memory. It did not turn your pc ino a CD player, rather added a vast (at the time) amount of storage. Most games in those days came on one or two floppy disks. Hard drives were much less than a gb more like 300mb or less.

[mrgoose]

Not all of them used IDE as I recall. We had several that used SCSI (requiring an adaptec SCSI adaptor) and one that used what I think was described as a "Matsui" connector that could only be connected to a particular type of sound card. It had a different number of pins from the standard IDE.

FWIW, the very first CD writer I used was in October 1994. I purchased it from CD Revolution in Chertsey on behalf of a customer. It was a Yamaha and came in a separate SCSI box, c/w a "massive" 2GB SCSI hard disc. The whole kit cost a bit under £4000.00 and the CD recordable discs were £30 each! But they seemed worth it at the time because at 650 MB each, they actually seemed phenomenally cheap, compared to the alternatives. I remember shortly afterwards I purchased my own 500 MB IDE hard drive. It cost a tad under £600 and was the biggest IDE drive I could get at the time.

The real problem was that computers were not fast enough to maintan the continuous data stream that CD burning required. Worse, the only CD burning software around at the time was a horrid 16 bit Windows lash-up called WinOnCD. It was pants!

Hmm, me & thee are showing our age, Snakey. Lol!

Best wishes, G.

[jonbanjo]

In Dos it was annoying as you had to load cd drivers and play around with memory settings as all that could be used for programs was 640k. The rest of the ram was held in Ext memory.

There was extended and expanded memory IIRC. Then there was some 64K limit for allocating one chunk of memory. I've a feeling that stayed with us until 32bit Windows and that Notepad was limited to this.