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 desktop or laptop. This has been the dominant way of using consumer optical media for some time.
Step back to the early CD-ROM era, though, and things were a little kookier. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drives hit the market that required the use of a bulky plastic caddy to load discs. The question is—why did we apparently need caddies then, and why don’t we use them any longer?
Caddyshack
The Compact Disc, as developed by Phillips and Sony, was first released in 1982. It quickly became a popular format for music, offering far higher fidelity than existing analog formats like vinyl and cassettes. The CD-ROM followed in 1985, offering hundreds of megabytes of storage in an era when most hard drives barely broke 30 MB. The discs used lasers to read patterns of pits and lands from a reflective aluminum surface, encased in tough polycarbonate plastic. Crucially, the discs featured robust error correction techniques so that small scratches, dust, or blemishes wouldn’t stop a disc from working.
Notably, the first audio CD player—the Sony CDP-101—was a simple tray-loading machine. Phillips’ first effort, the CD100, was a top-loader. Neither used a caddy. Nor did the first CD-ROM drives—the Phillips CM100 was not dissimilar from the CD100, and tray loaders were readily available too, like the Amdek Laserdrive-1.
So where did caddies come from? The concept had existed prior to CDs, most notably for the failed Capacitance Electronic Disc format created by RCA. Those discs were highly susceptible to problems with dust, so they were kept in caddies for their protection. For CDs, the caddy wasn’t a necessity—the plastic optical discs were robust enough to be handled directly. And yet, in the late 1980s, caddy CD-ROM drives started to become the norm in the nascent market, with Apple and Sony perhaps the most notable early adopters.
The basic concept of the caddy is fairly obvious by its design. Various non-compatible versions existed from different manufacturers, but the intent was the same. The CD itself was placed in a plastic case with some kind of sliding shutter. This case protected the CD from scratches, dust, smudges, and other contaminants. When it was placed in a drive, the shutter would slide or rotate out of the way, allowing access for the optical head to read the disc.
For many early applications, CD-ROMs were very much an archival format. They offered long-term storage, were non-writable, and had huge capacity. They were perfect for creating digital encyclopedias, with a single disc able to replace a stack of bound volumes that would take up a whole shelf. They were also perfect for commercial or industry use, where large databases or reference volumes could be stored in a far smaller format than ever before.
In these cases, though, it’s important to remember that CDs were quite expensive. For example, in 1986, a copy of Grolier’s Academic Encyclopedia would cost $199—or roughly $570 in today’s money. As robust as CDs were, it was at times desirable to protect such an investment with the added safety and security of a caddy. This was particularly useful in library, school, and business contexts, too, where end users couldn’t always be relied upon to use the discs gently.
Caddies also offered another side benefit of particular use to the radio industry. They made it very quick and easy to change discs, easing the work of on-air DJs as they cued up songs. Compare the ease of slamming in a cartridge, versus extracting a disc from a jewel case and gently placing it in a tray-loading drive. Under the pressure of a live broadcast, it’s clear to see the benefit of the caddy design. Particularly as sloppy handling would quickly damage discs that were on heavy rotation.
Caddies made sense at a time when the CDs and their content were incredibly expensive. They also made sense for professional media and corporate users. However, for the consumer, they quickly became a frustration rather than a boon.
The problem for home users was simple. Caddies added a certain level of expense that became less justified as the price of CD-ROM titles came down. The intent was that users would have a caddy for each disc in their collection, protecting the CDs and making them easy to load. However, many home users only had one or a handful of caddies. This meant users were often swapping discs from caddy to caddy, with the repetitive manual handling negating any benefit of the caddies in the first place. It quickly became an unwelcome chore for owners of caddy-loading drives.
As is the way, the market soon responded. By the late 1990s, caddy-based CD drives had mostly disappeared from the consumer market in favor of more convenient, caddy-free drives. Customers wanted easy-to-use drives, and they had no desire to put up with fussy plastic cases that were ultimately unnecessary. Tray-loaders became the norm for most CD-ROM applications, with slot loaders becoming more popular as a fancier option in some premium hardware.
Caddies did persist, but in more niche contexts. Standards like Mini Disc and UMD relied on integral, non-removable caddies, because Sony could never quite let go of the idea. Similarly, some early DVD-RAM drives relied on caddies too, as have various high-capacity optical archive standards. In these applications, caddies were chosen for two reasons—they were there to protect media that was either particularly delicate, valuable, or both. In the vast majority of cases, the caddy became an integral part of the media—rather than an external cart which discs could be swapped into and out of.
Caddy-based CD drives represent a transitional period in the early days of optical media. The lines between serious archival users and home users were blurred, and nobody quite knew where the technology was going. They highlight a period when engineers and manufacturers were still exploring the best methods build reliable drives that best met their users needs. From a consumer perspective, these protective devices are now curious relics in the post-optical era—a reminder of when laser-based media was on the absolute cutting edge of technology. How times have changed.
We had those exact same Denon caddie players at our college radio station in 1999. Older CDs in the stacks had their own caddies but generally the discs were less precious and current rotation CDs had to be removed from their standard case and inserted into a caddie. Which of course at my 4 AM overnight shift only increased the chances of damaging the discs …
The caddy was about the same size as a regular CD box, so you can also turn it around:
Why would you want to take the CD out of the box to put it into a player?
Putting the whole caddy into the CD player is more convenient then first taking it out of the box. I guess price difference was mostly determined by “novelty” and “perceived value”, and consumers were not inclined to pay much extra for that.
Only much later, when CD-R’s were bought in stacks of 100 and for a price of 20ct each the price of those caddies would have been a relatively significant cost, but the CD-R’s were often givaways and the caddies could be opened and reused. But it’s all past tense now.
I think the issue with caddies was the lack of standardization: As stated early in the article, “Various non-compatible versions existed from different manufacturer”. If the caddy design was standardized, CD cases could be designed around conforming to that standard, which could perhaps even be designed with for holding leaflets in a pocket of the case that can open without exposing the disc itself. Though if we’re dealing with a disc format meant primarily for holding arbitrary digital media rather than audio, another option might be to simply store the contents of the leaflet as a web page embedded as another file on the disc.
I posit that if there were a standardized case-loading media with writers available to consumers, and the drives and cassettes at a cost per capacity aimed at being competitive with hard drives, it could be viable as a product today, especially if it were small enough to fit the reader and ideally writer for it in a reasonably sized tablet or even phone case. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the standardized case-loading optical media mentioned in the article:
UMDs were only ever made available in read-only format.
A quick search on Optical Disc Archive shows that the drives go at a price of over six thousand dollars, and after that the cartridges themselves cost several hundred each: One 5.5TB optical drive currently costs more than an 8T hard drive.
MiniDisk… Seems a bit weirder to get a bead on, but honestly I just never heard about it much? Technically speaking, the format could eventually handle GB-capacity discs, and writers were discontinued after the first Android Smartphones were introduced, so that could arguably have worked out, but what I’m reading suggests that even though MD data disks existed, almost all interest in the format is audio-focused.
Looking at the Wikipedia article for optical drives, I’m not sure if there’s been much interest in developing a format with the characteristics I described above, and I’m not sure how much of that it due to technical difficulties in pushing performance and cost in that direction and how much is due to overlooking the niche described.
Sony refused to license the tech out and deliberately tried to make the audio and data versions incompatible, presumably to guard the album sales from piracy, so it never caught on.
Then I guess seeing how good open source CNC machines can get at fabricating data disks is something I’ll want to file away as a thing to work on if I ever actually get into that kind of thing.
What album sales?
The MD data format was quickly dropped because the MO drives were faster, cheaper and more supported.
Kind of surprised that this links my 2021 piece from Tedium but doesn’t highlight my primary conclusion, which is that CD-ROM caddies were a solution to an engineering problem, in that tray-loading mechanisms had not become small enough to fit into internal drive bays at the time caddies were in wide use.
While it wasn’t the only reason caddies existed, of course, it explains a lot about why they fell out of use—eventually, that engineering problem was solved.
I read this thinking about your article about it and having this weird brain itch that the information didn’t line up when what I read. (Not that I could remember, 2021 was 400 years ago)
Serves as a humble reminder to double check sources people give.
Excellent article and I do agree with your conclusion. I did find this bit funny though:
“How do you fit one of these into a standard 5.25-inch drive bay? You can’t do the flip-up model, really.”
The “flip up model” was in fact one of the early solutions alongside caddies. My first CD-ROM drive did just that, with the whole drive sliding out the front exposing a flip up lid, top loading mechanism. They didn’t stick around as long though, I don’t think they ever got past 1X speed drives. I’m pretty sure they all used proprietary interfaces too, I never saw one that used SCSI or IDE, all requiring a dedicated controller card or one of those sound cards with 4+ different pin header connections for the various competing manufacturers.
DVD-RAM continued to use caddies quite late into its operational life as well.
We used them for audio recording systems basically until they stopped producing drives for them (2010?) and then we used the discs without the caddies.
I do miss the durability of them though… between the ease of slapping a label on the disc and not needing to worry about it getting put in the wrong case, to the satisfying clunk of them going into the drives.
If it was easier to get or refurbish drives, I would likely still use them as part of my data backup as I probably still have a stack of discs from over the years.
wow, the nostalgia of that sony CD player…. I recently had to find a stack of CDrs so i could burn some cd’s for an old miata i picked up. what a throwback. I honestly wish it had a tape deck. old car cd players had terrible or no anti-skip buffering.
Nostalgic indeed. My first CD player was that exact model. When I’d shop for audio CDs at Tower in San Diego there was just one small rack of them at $18.99 a pop. The improvement in sound quality over vinyl made them worthwhile, even at that price.
You can add Aux input and/or get a $10-20 Bluetooth module for the stock radio.
First gen:
http://www.sonic.net/%7Efosterm/miata/wiring-for-sonycd.html
Newer models there are Bluetooth options, Amazon has for $15. On my Odyssey and Mini Cooper those can even skip tracks, take phone calls.
My kids are 19 and 25 and they are obsessed with buying new music on Vinyl. Shops have sprung up over-charging for ‘vintage’ film and cameras etc too. My youngest started burning CDs, and the nicest fhing Incan say for her new fake walkman is now they recharge instead of eat AA batteries. Although it has a MicroSD port too so the point of it is completely lost on me, unless it could rip the CDs to the memory card. (I grew up when Sony had waterproof metal CD walkman radios, it was a crazy time).
‘So where did caddies come from?’
Phillips CD300
No comment on a fine article, but Aaaaah the memories. My first CD player was the Sony D50 portable. Unbelievably amazing at the time for only $300 ($800+ today), the sound quality was as good or better than a cassette player as long as the CD had no scratches, so OK it look 10-20 seconds to spool up and start playing and 5-10 seconds to skip to the next track, oh yeah and the battery pack (6 C-Cells IIRC) was bigger and heavier than the player and would die before a CD finishes and don’t move the “portable” player or it will skip like mad. But yeah, what a great device :)
I briefly worked at a college radio station in the 1990s. I don’t remember if the CDs were in caddies, but if you had told me that was for convenience, I would have said “what, compared to cueing up a vinyl LP?”
(Yes yes, the convenience argument would be for libraries of 5-second jingles etc., not music. And I guess we did use MD for that).
Anyway, I bet the real story is that Sony wanted integral caddies (reasonable), Philips wanted bare discs (also reasonable), and we ended up with optional, removable caddies as a “compromise” (objectively stupid).
MiniDisc was in caddies so you could just throw one in your pocket and it wouldn’t break. MD was small enough for that. CDs didn’t really fit in your pocket so covering them wasn’t a concern.
The MD was too small to really print any album art on, and it would be inside the machine while listening so you couldn’t read the track list, so they came up with a slightly larger box to house all the album art and print material. If the CD was put in a caddy, the box for the caddy with the album art etc. would have been even bigger and too inconvenient.
Funnily enough, early on, there were complaints that CDs were too small and easy to steal. Hence the development of the ludicrous “long box” packaging format.
Both can be true at the same time. A CD doesn’t easily fit a pocket, but you can still stuff the jewel case under your belt and walk out of the store.
Also, how you are willing to treat the CD you spent a significant chunk of your paycheck on is a lot different than how you are willing to treat the CD you just need to get out of the store this one time.
i was born in 79, and I dont think I ever cued up an LP, hell I have only played one a couple times in my life and it was my moms Christmas music
What’s next, the great spats vs. sanitary napkins debate?
I remember when caddy drives were the most commonly seen optical drives, but I sure don’t miss the caddies! I also remember when a decent CD-ROM burner drive would cost thousands of dollars. I’m glad they’ve come down in price a bit since then…
Some of us still make daily use of CD and DVD disks. My 2010 car has a CD player that reads CD-ROM disks, so I can put 5 or 6 albums on a single disk. It’s handy for long car rides, naturally. I also still use the optical drive on my PC regularly, usually for watching movies or ripping new CDs, which brings up the point that some of us still prefer to keep physical media on hand. I don’t have to worry about DRM on my music, or Netflix pulling my favorite movies that way.
The name “Philips” the inventor of the CD, only has one L.
I’ve skipped the caddies. The Mitsumi LU005S from 1992 didn’t use one.
Instead, I’ve always treated my stuff with care. Or I’ve tried my best, at least.
The CD-ROMs had been held properly: Thumb and middle/ring finger on outer side, with the index finger in the hole for stabilization.
I’ve even used paper or plastic sleaves for 3,5 floppy disks, just like for 5,25″ diskettes.
Diskette boxes were a must, too. To keep everything tidy.
It always puzzled me why others didn’t handle their stuff with same care as me.
To me, it was a matter of culture. I didn’t want to be a bavarian.
Acting civilized was just natural. High tech born from human ingenuity deserved respect.
Bavarians are just the wurst!
Caddy’s persisted into the late 1900s and even after 2000. They were used by auto manufacturers and high-end AV companies like Bose, among others, to allow the loading of multiple CDs at a time.
Optical media was and is rather fragile. To this day, I have burned DVDs which are basically unreadable due to the recording layer having separated from the plastic. Not to mention XSX and PS5 games that are not particularly old but need a little doctoring on occasion to be readable. And I take good care of them.
And then there’s M-Disc, which came out over a decade ago supposedly will last 100 years. I have a few of these and they have the same issues as other DVDs, and good luck finding a machine 20 years from now that’ll be equipped to read any kind of optical media.
Some of the CD-ROM media at the library were specially made for libraries and rather expensive. And having anyone with a library card using the multimedia equipment meant lots of greasy fingers on stuff.
For stuff that was regularly accessed there was a server with about a dozen SCSI CD-ROM drives attached to it. You could access any disc loaded into the server from any terminal on the library network. It had stuff like an encyclopedia, a card catalog cross reference program, some maps, plus some random stuff that was loaded on there on request.
For me, I preferred caddies. But the price to buy empty caddies was excessive. If there would have been some standardization I think it could have come down significantly.
What’s weird is the 5-disc caddy for our CD player was cheaper than the typical CD-ROM caddy. I often looked at is and wished my computer had a multi-disc caddy. Especially in the later era of CD keys.
I can’t speak for others, but I was very glad our Apple Mac came with a caddy drive. I bought a few caddies to put our kids’ CDs into, so they could use them, without my worrying about them scratching them, or getting them sticky or dirty somehow. I know that some caddies had crayon marks on them, etc. So yeah, if you had young kids, caddies were a great idea!
if only the greatest of all caddy media had survived and thrived long enough to get rw capability. Dataplay was an amazing tech that sadly missed its day. https://i.imgur.com/3kZhOf1.jpeg
I still have that Sony CD player. And while it does not use caddies (of course), to power it with batteries you slide the entire player into a tricorder-looking case that takes C batteries. It’s giant!
What should be called out is the continued idiotic use of caddies, trays, or screw-on tracks for drives of all kinds… especially SSDs. I have a RAID that makes me screw every drive into a pointless tray. Dumb AF.
Hey guys. The correct name is Philips, with one L.
I feel fairly certain that Grolier’s encyclopedia was expensive because it was an encyclopedia, not because it was on a CD. Before Wikipedia, everyone had this notion that encyclopedias had to be expensive. Maybe they didn’t sell too many and they took a lot of effort to write and edit. A CD based encyclopedia was still much cheaper than a bound set, but that’s probably still mostly IP costs than the cost of binding books.
That makes sense. And in some ways both sides were right.
Yes, information and education should be available to all human kind but on other hand, information is valuable. Knowledge is power.
A whole encyclopedia shouldn’t be a cheap throw away item, I mean.
Looking at it this way, it made sense that Grolier saw the intellectual value here and not just material cost.
Profits were surely a big driving force, as well, no question. Production cost was tiny compared to a whole shelf of books.
But the intellectual value was at least half as important to them for sure.
The then-new index feature, use of hyperlinks and the full text search were very comfortable to work with for example.
The lack of wear shouldn’t be forgotten, either. A laser ray doesn’t physically cause degradation of the medium (it does, maybe, but barely).
Paper books were wearing out much faster.
I mean, you don’t start an encyclopedia business if you don’t believe in its worth from very start.
There must be a sentimental or ideologic reason begind it, as well.
Just like production of bibles, maybe. You don’t enter production of pretty, luxurious bibles if the whole thing doesn’t spark your interest in some way. Be it because of the art work, a beloved person beinga priest or because of fascination for book press or something.
Compiling and producing the material wasn’t cheap back in the day when you didn’t have an internet full of unpaid volunteers to write your articles for you.
I believe you’re correct. I bought several CD drives which back when a 4X drive was a couple hundred bucks and they often came with discs. I think it was Compton s Encyclopedia which was often thrown in. It wasn’t a great encyclopedia, but in the 1980s it was neat to have a searchable encyclopedia with hypertext references. It was like Vanavar Bush’s Memex brought to life. Microsoft Bookshelf wasn’t bad; I don’t recall when it debuted or the cost.
It doesn’t feel like that was almost 40 years ago. Time flies (like an arrow, fruit flies a banana — Woody Allen).
now do an article explaining why the jewel case / dvd case standard requires you to push hard enough to bend the disc in order to free it
Normally, it shouldn’t. You press down the middle part (knob) that holds the CD and then it can be removed without much force.
Unfortunately, newer cases nolonger have the old knobs with the stripes but are solid.
They don’t release the medium the same way that jewel cases from the 80s and 90s did.
Back in early 90s I paid $70 per “Gold plated” CD-R and about $800 per Read only SCSI CD-ROM Drive. The time was different and the discs better be more protected back then.
I used to sell CDs filled with warez in the mid-90s. I remember the writer was a couple of grand and the size of big VCR and the blanks were about $25/piece. There was no buffer on those early systems, so if your HDD had to recalibrate for a microsecond then the whole CD-R was toast. Enough to make a grown-man cry. These were like 0.5X writers too IIRC, because I had to set an alarm every hour or so all night to get up and switch discs.
Around ’88 or so I in Hungary one of the institutes of the Academy in Budapest purchased a CD with some kind of database that was very expensive. Another institute located in a rural town wanted to use it but it was too expensive to get another copy. It wasn’t protected, but writable CDs were not even available yet. I was hired to write a DOS device driver pair to remote to CD interface via modems. The CD was in the drive in Budapest and the program that used the CD in the remote location thought it was accessing it from a local drive. Worked quite nicely.
This was a bit verbose to explain that caddies keep kids from scratching or slathering debris onto loose CDs.
In the 15 years or so of caddy popularity, the only ones I encountered were the ones shown with the Macintosh in this article. I just ran across a caddy in y desk draw a couple of days ago, very timely retro revisit.
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