Holding Your Breath While Burning CDs

Once or twice on this blog I’ve mentioned the first CD-ROM Burner I ever used, but I don’t think I ever talked about it in detail. A project I’ve recently been working on reminded me of those old days.

In either late 1995 or early 1996, my department at work purchased a CD-ROM Burner. It cost $1,000. Not only was it the first one I had ever used, it was the first one I had ever seen. It was external, slightly taller than a modern CD-ROM drive, and a little over twice as wide. In addition to the actual CD-ROM burner, also inside the case was was a SCSI hard drive with a 650 MB partition. The unit came with a SCSI card and an external cable to connect the two. I don’t remember if the card was proprietary or not. If I remember correctly, the blank CDs had to be inserted into a CD caddy first before being inserted into the drive. (I could be mixing up units on that last memory, but that seems right.)

Whatever data you wanted to burn to a CD had to be first copied to the unit’s internal hard drive. When actually burning a CD, the data was pulled from the device’s hard drive and not your PC’s. This was a good design for a couple of reasons. First, my work computer (the computer the burner was connected to) only had a 540 MB hard drive at the time, so the hard drive inside the unit was actually larger that the hard drive inside my computer! And second, in theory, because the unit was burning files from its own internal hard drive, accessing your computer’s hard drive wouldn’t affect the CD-ROM’s burning process.

Again, “in theory.”

We purchased a CD-ROM Burner because we didn’t have a WAN at that time. It makes me laugh to remember how we used to perform remote technical support. To work on remote networks we used PC Anywhere over dial-up. When a computer specialist called and needed technical assistance, they would launch PC Anywhere in answer mode and then we would dial in to their admin workstations, using our modems and analog phone lines. When rebuilding or setting up a new office, it was actually faster to burn a CD and mail it to the office rather than trying to transfer hundreds of megabytes of data over a 28.8 modem connection.

I think the CD-ROM Burner was connected to my machine because I had one of the fastest computers on the help desk: a screaming 486 DX/4-100 MHz machine with 8 MB of RAM. I don’t recall how I lucked into such a fast machine, seeing as how some of my co-workers still had AT&T 386 WGS machines (affectionately referred to as “wigs”), but you didn’t hear me complaining!

Whenever we needed a CD-ROM burned, it was my job to compile all the files on the external device’s hard drive and then burn the CD. Once you clicked “go,” it was time to cross your fingers and hold your breath, for any hiccup on your PC would cause the burning to abort. The biggest killer of CDs I recall was my screen saver. Should you forget to disable it and your computer went to sleep, it was all over. The burning process would abort and eject your freshly ruined $10 coaster. Sometimes, something as minuscule as receiving an email would be enough to cause the entire process to crash.

If you needed a CD copied, the contents of the CD had to be transferred to the unit’s internal hard drive first and then burned back to a blank CD. Also keep in mind that this CD-ROM burner operated at 1x, meaning that each full CD took over an hour to burn (not including the time it took to copy the files over to the unit’s hard drive).

We could have, in theory, copied audio CDs with the thing — however, at $10 per blank CD, economically it didn’t make much sense. MP3 files were just starting to take hold in 1995, and it would be several years before I had enough of them to fill a single CD-ROM. We were allowed to use the device for personal use (as long as we paid for our own blank CDs), and I used it to burn CDs for my BBS. I don’t remember for sure how I got the files to work — either I used Zip Disks or my portable tape backup unit — but once there I would burn a CD full of files and then put the CD-ROM on my BBS, freeing up multiple hard drives worth of space.

One story I know I’ve told is the time my friends Johnny, Jeff and I went in three ways and bought 10 blank CDs for $100. I paid $40 and got four CDs while the other guys each got three. I used two of my CDs to burn every single piece of software and file I owned, and kept the other two to use later. Those early blank CDs were not made as well as they are today, and roughly ten years after I burned them the metal layers began to physically flake off of the discs, ruining them. I was able to recover and/or replace 99% of the files I had stored on those first four CD-ROMs, but it was time consuming. Additionally, those early burned CDs don’t work well in modern CD-ROM drives. I had to locate older (read: slower) CD-ROM drives to read them. None of the combination CD/DVD drives I own would even read them.

Last night on my computer I was simultaneously converting a VHS tape to a digital file while also ripping a DVD to an MP4 file, listening to MP3s, and surfing the web. While doing all of those things at once I couldn’t help but think about the old days where something as innocuous as receiving an email could crash our CD-ROM burner and ruin a $10 blank disc.