does anyone remember when cd burners first came out?

[vi edit]

Originally posted by: DaveJ

Originally posted by: vi_edit
2x2x8 for around $350 in '96 or '97 I think. I'm trying to even remember the brand...started with an "R" and sounded really "Asian"...sort of like Ryobi...but that wasn't it.

Was it Ricoh?

That's it! Ok...so that isn't as "Asian" sounding as I thought. But it did start with an "R".

 

[deerslayer]

I believe I paid $320 for my first CDRW drive (8x burn speed). It was a long time ago.

 

[BD2003]

Hell, I remember spending $100 for 8mb of ram and $250 for a voodoo 1, all powered by my godlike 133mhz AMD 486, which a pentium 60 could blow away. I couldnt even decode a 128kbps mp3 with that thing.

 

[vi edit]

Originally posted by: vshah

Originally posted by: ed21x
4x2x8 for $400. My Plextor 12x10x32A is still going strong

i have that same plextor drive - they are rock solid

Heh. I still have my old Plextor "Ultra" 40x SCSI drive and the Imation 8x20 that was the Plextor clone that I reflashed with a Plextor BIOS so that I could use the Plextools suite of software.

 

[jhayx7]

Originally posted by: NaOH
first burner..sony 2x max for close to $3xx. It had a CD caddey that you would place CDs or CDRs into to read or burn. That thing burnt plenty of coasters back in the day.

I had the same burner

My next burner was a new Yamaha 6x SCSI burner. I could burn a CD while playing a game :Q

 

[jhayx7]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
2x2x8 for around $350 in '96 or '97 I think. I'm trying to even remember the brand...started with an "R" and sounded really "Asian"...sort of like Ryobi...but that wasn't it.

Ran it on a P-133. Yikes. Hour long rips + another hour for the burn. Turned off all background aps, disabled screen savers, ect.

Pretty crazy how far things have progressed. Recently I was able to play Half Life 2 while burning a DVD.

Ricoh?

 

[Rock Hydra]

my mom bought me a phillips 12x4x32 drive for my birthday in like 1999 or something. it used to burn an Assload of coasters until I discovered Nero. then it prettymuch stopped burning coasters altogether. god I hated ez cd creator 4, cost me a fortune in cd-rs.

 

[MDE]

My first was a 16x10x40 LiteOn drive that I paid about $110 for. I was a little late to the game with DVD burners too, I waited until I found one for something like $50 after rebate.

 

[Mxylplyx]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
i remember when cd players first came out
i paid $375 ,i think, for a 3X cd reader and sound blaster 16 controller card. that was under a trade up program where i had to send in my "old" 8 bit sound blaster card to upgrade

that was about 1994 or 1995, i think it was just before windows 95 came out

I had a Toshiba CD-ROM with a SCSI interface, and loaded CD's via a CD cartridge instead of a tray. That puppy cost $800.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

I remember one of my first upgrades was to a 386-sx computer. I bought an 800mb(replaced a 100mb)hard drive for $350 and 8 x 1mb ram(replacing 8 x 128k) for $400
A $750 upgrade to a rig I paid $1500 for.

I had over 2 grand(in 1990 dollars) invested in a box that had the computing power of a current day wrist watch:laugh:

 

[purbeast0]

My first burner was an IDE HP 2x burner that was $300. Spindles of crap media were about $60 (Hi-Val). Also if you even did ANYTHING on your PC while burning ... COASTER!

I remember I had to shut my screen saver off because if it came on while burning it would cause a coaster. Was a big PITA.

 

[nakedfrog]

The first time I saw an ad for one in high school, I think it was $500-600. I was in a band, and was talking to the singer about how it would be cool to have one so we could burn our own CDs. He said "Why would we want to burn CDs?"

While we're talking about old stuff, I also remember saving up $150 so I could buy a Sound Blaster 16 COMPATIBLE. Not even the real thing.

 

[randomlinh]

my first burner... an 8x Imation that was a rebadged plextor... $200 at best buy for the scsi kit.

 

[Zolty]

Originally posted by: Zaitsevs
this thread is now about any type of old hardware

I remember building my first computer -

I mailed a check to newegg.com, I already had an athlon 2200+ from a friend who upgraded and gave me his old one. I mailed a check for 210.30$ that was for a 512 stick of ram and an MSI motherboard that is still going strong.

man was I antsy.

So 5 years ago. That really isn't that old.

 

[fustercluck]

Originally posted by: Adaman
I need a cheap, reliable CD burner. Any chance I could score one for 10 bucks or am I looking more around $20? For some reason every CD/DVD burner this fam has bought in the past has never worked very well. Could trade a DVD drive for one

post bump

 

[SlowSpyder]

I don't remember how much they cost in the early days, but at my first IT job at Snap On Tools, my buddy and I would come into the office on saturdays as being a big company they could afford luxurious new wave IT goodies, like a 2x burner. We were king sh!t with our own mix CD's in our cars. This was well before CD burners were anywhere close to mainstream for home PC's. I remember many people being absolutely amazed that we made our own CD's.

My first CD burner ws an Acer 12x that I bought from Best Buy for $80.

 

[dainthomas]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
I remember one of my first upgrades was to a 386-sx computer. I bought an 800mb(replaced a 100mb)hard drive for $350 and 8 x 1mb ram(replacing 8 x 128k) for $400
A $750 upgrade to a rig I paid $1500 for.

I had over 2 grand(in 1990 dollars) invested in a box that had the computing power of a current day wrist watch:laugh:

Rofl. My cell phone has more storage than my first computer (Packard Bell) did back in 95. Plays better games too. Can get a 1gb microsd card now for probably a tenth the price of a 1gb hd back then.

 

[secretanchitman]

we upgraded pentium 2 266Mhz with a pioneer slot-load dvd-rom drive (still works to this day) and a yamaha (i think) 4x4x16 cd-rw drive. still works nicely to this day.

of course, we swapped it out and put in a 40x12x48x lite-on cd-rw...

 

[GroundZero]

i had a ti-99 4-a
my first pc other than that was a 8066 after the sanyo green screen pos

 

[GroundZero]

Originally posted by: Adaman

Originally posted by: Adaman
I need a cheap, reliable CD burner. Any chance I could score one for 10 bucks or am I looking more around $20? For some reason every CD/DVD burner this fam has bought in the past has never worked very well. Could trade a DVD drive for one

post bump

got 3 extras sitting here. but it would cost you way more than it would be worth in shipping than to just buy one!!!

 

[TXHokie]

My first CD drive was a cheapy and cost me $100. When it spin up it sounded like a jet engine and I could feel my computer vibrate. Turns perfectly fine manufactured blanks into more coasters than I'd like.

 

[GroundZero]

kind of like storage...
i remember when i got a new hd for 380 bucks and said how will i ever use all of this 240 meg drive!

 

[GroundZero]

you will never need more than 64 megs of ram....

 

[shortylickens]

I remember when they were close to a thousand bucks and made more scrap than a wrecking yard.

The first one I actually owned was in a Prostar laptop (forgive me, I didnt know better).
It was supposed to be a desktop replacement and had a DVD reader/CD writer.
Not to mention 3D acceleration. I think the upgrade from a CD reader to a combo drive was actually quite reasonable though.
I also remember when the Kenwood TrueX drives were out. Never owned one but I was told they were super fast.

Right now I just have a generic dual-layer burner I got from newegg for about 30 bucks.
Amazing how quickly things change.

 

[ColdFusion718]

Originally posted by: atomicacid55
I had a 2x burner for $300 or something. And then I got a 4x burner for around that much too. I was the sh!t in school. People were like "WHOAZ you got a burner, burn this game... burn this album.. burn this burn that." This was also back when we were stuck in 56k land. Yea. Download MP3s at like 20 minutes/song and then burn a full CD which would take another 20 minutes.. and voila you could play it on your damn car now.

Originally posted by: TheNinja
My first burner was an HP and I paid around $400 for it. I thought I was so cool that I could rip songs off all my CDs and make one "super CD". I think I paid around $4-$5 for a blank disc. I would then charge people $10 to make a mix CD for them. I didn't make too many coasters once I realized that I had to kill every other process that was running. It used to take like 1 hour to burn a CD so when I had a long list of requests from people, I would set my alarm and get up every 2 hours during the night to start a new CD. Quite the little enterprise I had going. Although after all the coasters I made and the time it took to rip or download a song I was probably making 2 bucks an hour.

Oh yea... I had an HP burner too. I charged people a fortune for burning CDs. I remember buying blank CDs for like $20 for 10.... LOL. That was hilarious.

Gosh.. I loved my HP 2x2x6 on Parallel port.. LOL EXTERNAL DRIVE FTW! And then I got a 4x4x6 external USB drive.... Upgraded to my parents' 4x4x24 which used the same drive as my external, except I was limited in reads by USB.

4x4x24 lasted me FOREVER until one day I bought a $49 TDK 52x burner after my knee ripped shattered the whole tray of my 12x DVD drive.

Now I use both my 52x TDK VeloCD which is the equivalent of a 52x LiteOn along with my NEC 3540. My TDK drive burns hella errors (I don't know why), and I primarly rely on my NEC drive anyways.

Dude, you just brought back all these memories for me!

Back in the day (1997-1998), my friend and I made a bunch of money by hosting web ads (net radio or something). We were both juniors in high school. We bought that same HP DVD burner. I remember being afraid to touch the mouse when it was burning (one time a mild earthquake caused a coaster). The discs were $2-3 back then.

We'd share the drive between the two of us. I burned CDs for people and charged them $10 a pop. Oh those were the good old days. /nostalgia