Why Did Early CD-ROM Drives Rely On Awkward Plastic Caddies?

December 18, 2024 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

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

*Early CD players, like this top-loading Sony D-50, didn’t use caddies. Credit: Binarysequence, CC BY-SA 4.0*

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. Continue reading “Why Did Early CD-ROM Drives Rely On Awkward Plastic Caddies?” →

How The CD-ROM Lost The Multimedia Dream To The Internet

June 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 77 Comments

High-tech movie guides on CD-ROM; clearly the future had arrived in 1994.

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, the internet and especially the World Wide Web didn’t seem to be of any major significance, as it didn’t have the reach or bandwidth for the Hot New Thing^tm in the world of PCs: multimedia. Enter the CD-ROM, which since its introduction in 1985 had brought the tantalizing feature of seemingly near-infinite storage within reach, and became cheap enough for many in the early 90s. In a recent article by [Harry McCracken] he reflects on this era, and how before long it became clear that it was merely a bubble.

Of course, there was a lot of good in CD-ROMs, especially when considering having access to something like Encarta before Wikipedia and broadband internet was a thing. It also enabled software titles to be distributed without the restrictions of floppy disks. We fondly remember installing Windows 95 (without Internet Explorer) off 13 1.44 MB floppies, followed by a few buckets of Microsoft Office floppies. All pray to the computer gods for no sudden unreadable floppy.

Inevitably, there was a lot of shovelware on CD-ROMs, and after the usefulness of getting free AOL floppies (which you could rewrite), the read-only CD-ROMs you got in every magazine and spam mailing were a big disappointment. Although CD-ROMs and DVDs still serve a purpose today, it’s clear that along with the collapse of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, early 2000s, optical media has found a much happier place. It’s still hard to beat the sheer value of using CD-R(W)s and DVD-/+R(W)s (and BD-Rs) for offline backups, even if for games and multimedia they do not appear to be relevant any more.

If you’re interested in another depiction of this period, it’s somewhere we’ve been before.

An 8-bit ISA card being plugged into a motherboard

Reverse-Engineering An ISA Card To Revive An Ancient CD-ROM Drive

October 4, 2022 by Robin Kearey 22 Comments

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 side of a format war: just ask anyone who committed to HD-DVD fifteen years ago. If, on the other hand, you were among the few who invested in CD-ROM when it was first released in the mid-1980s, you definitely made the right choice when it came to storage media. However, it was a bit of a different story for the interface that hooks up the CD drive to your computer, as [Tech Tangents] found out when he managed to get his hands on a first-generation CM100 drive. (Video, embedded below.)

That wonderful piece of 1985 technology is not much smaller than the IBM PC it was designed to connect to, and it originally came with its own CM153 ISA interface card. But while most eBay sellers recognized the historic value of a pioneering CD-ROM drive, the accompanying PC was typically a dime-a-dozen model and was thrown out with the rare interface card still inside. Even after searching high and low for over a year, the only information [Tech Tangents] could find about the card was a nine year old YouTube video that showed what the thing looked like.

Luckily, the maker of that video was willing to take high-resolution pictures of the card, which allowed [Tech Tangents] to figure out how it worked. As it turned out, the card was entirely made from standard 7400 series logic chips as well as an 8251 USART, which meant that it should be possible to design a replacement simply by following all the traces on the board. [Tech Tangents] set to work, and after a few weeks of reverse-engineering he had a complete schematic and layout ready in KiCAD.

After the PCBs were manufactured and populated with components, it was time to test the new card with the old drive. This wasn’t a simple process either: as anyone who’s tried to get obscure hardware to work in MS-DOS will tell you, it involves countless hours of trying different driver versions and setting poorly documented switches in CONFIG.SYS. Eventually however, the driver loaded correctly and the ancient CD-ROM drive duly transferred the files stored on a Wolfenstein 3D disk.

If you’re lucky enough to own a CM100 or a similar drive from that era, you’ll be happy to know that all design files for the CM153 clone are available on GitHub. This isn’t the first time someone has had to re-create an interface board from pictures alone: we’ve seen a similar project involving a SCSI card for a synthesizer. Thanks for the tip, [hackbyte]!

Continue reading “Reverse-Engineering An ISA Card To Revive An Ancient CD-ROM Drive” →

Burn Pictures On A CD-R, No Special Drive Needed

July 11, 2022 by Jenny List 63 Comments

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 CD was a very big deal indeed. These now archaic storage media came first as silver pre-recorded CD-ROMs, then later as recordable CD-Rs. Most people eventually owned CD writer drives, and some fancy ones came with the feature of etching pictures in the unused portions of the disc.

Haven’t got a fancy drive and desire an etched CD-R? No worries, [arduinocelentano] has a solution, in software which writes a disk image for a standard CD writer whose data makes the visible image on the disc.

CD-Rs have a thin layer of phthalate dye sandwiched between the polycarbonate disc and a silvered layer of lacquer. They’re often gold coloured, but the silvering is in fact just aluminium. The data is encoded as a series of pits and lands crested by the laser vapourising small portions of the dye to make holes.

The code creates a data structure of a standard CD-ROM session which doesn’t contain any usable data, instead whose pits and lands are arranged to form the image. You can find it all in a GitHub repository, and have a go at creating your own offerings. We would have made a Wrencher disc for our pictures, but sadly for some of us who were once in the thick of it we don’t have any CD-Rs any more.

Robotic Hand Uses Old CD-ROM Parts

May 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

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, which relies on parts salvaged from old CD-ROM drives.

The arm itself is constructed of many components which appear to be 3D printed, with three main motors visible along its length. These look to be the eject motors harvested from several optical drives, which usefully come with a threaded screw on the output shaft that makes them perfect for a linear-drive application. Run by a TMC2208 driver via a microcontroller, the eject motors control the motion of several stages of the robot arm as it moves up and down.

The intention seems to be that one of these three-tiered assemblies could act as a single finger. Ganged up multiple times, this could allow the creation of something akin to a full five-digit robot hand. [kthod2000] has also done plenty of work on the software side of things that handles controlling the arm. The kinematics can all be simulated on screen in concert with the real motion of the arm.

We’ve seen similar builds before, too, like this plotter built out of scrap DVD drives. They’re a great source of quality electromechanical components for small projects, so it’s no surprise to see them put to work here. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Robotic Hand Uses Old CD-ROM Parts” →

An Arduino And A CD-ROM Drive Makes A CD Player

January 3, 2021 by Jenny List 49 Comments

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 possible to dabble in the world of 120 mm polycarbonate discs if you have a fancy for it. It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.

The project draws heavily from the work of previous experimenters, notably ATAPIDUINO, but it extends them by taking its audio from the drive’s S/PDIF output. A port expander drives the IDE interface, while a Cirrus Logic WM8805 S/PDIF transceiver handles the digital audio and converts it to an I²S stream. That in turn is fed to a Texas Instruments PCM5102 DAC, which provides a line-level audio output. All the code and schematic can be found in a GitHub repository.

To anyone who worked in the CD-ROM business back in the 1990s this project presses quite a few buttons, though perhaps not enough to dig out all those CDs again. It would be interesting to see whether the I²S stream could be lifted from inside the drive directly, or even if the audio data could be received via the IDE bus. If you’d like to know a bit more about I²S , we have an article for you.

Medium Over Message: A CD-ROM Multimedia Bubble Survivor’s Tale

November 15, 2016 by Jenny List 102 Comments

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 have been a completely obvious threat from the alternative that sidelined them. It is a tale of personal experience that prompts this line of thought, for the industry that tempted me away from hardware to a career in electronic publishing in the early 1990s was CD-ROM multimedia.

Continue reading “Medium Over Message: A CD-ROM Multimedia Bubble Survivor’s Tale” →