In the early 90s, the first digital media appeared - compact discs. But disks (even pirated ones) were expensive, and digital copying facilities were not yet available. Music from a CD could only be copied onto a cassette tape.
By the way, the MP3 format appeared only in 1994, and the Winamp player came out in 1997. The oldest mp3 file on my computer is dated 1999.
CD-Rs were patented in 1988, but at first discs and recording devices were very expensive. The first CD recorder, which appeared in 1990, was the size of a washing machine and cost $ 35,000. By 1996, the price of CD recorders had dropped to $ 1000, and blank discs to $ 10.
That's when I got my first CD recorder. Philips CDD522.
I bought it for $ 200 from "writers" who used the recorder around the clock to burn pirated discs. According to their calculations, the recorder was completely worn out and it only had to record no more than a hundred discs. I was completely satisfied with this, because the price was twenty times lower than the price of a new one.
The recorder weighed 8 kilograms, was connected via SCSI and was able to write at single and double speed (80 or 40 minutes disk).
The CDs were green or gold.
I bought the first two discs with a recorder for $ 10, then the price began to fall rapidly. Surprisingly, I found these discs.
For almost twenty-five years, the plastic has turned yellow, but the discs are perfectly readable. Right now as I write this post, I am listening to the 1996 "Lay it down" album by the Cowboy Junkies from one of these CDs.
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
The main topic of my blog is technology in human life. I write reviews, share experiences, talk about all sorts of interesting things. My second project - lamptest.ru. I test LED bulbs and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.