Well fuck me, that's a name I haven't heard for close to 20 years and it didn't twig until just now.

Ah fuck, I remember Nero, and I know why it is called Nero (because Nero and the burning of rome), but I never connect the ROM to ROME.

And now I just got it too lol

E: never let it be said I am not slow on the uptake. 🙄

Core memory unlocked!

I still have a copy of Nero Express on a DVD in my bookcase.

Not that I use it very much - if I ever need to burn an iso Ill use xfburn or brasero or something like that, as I run Linux now. It's more if I need to burn data onto disk's to get it off an older PC.

And these things called optical drives.

"There's an error message on my screen."

"What does it say?"

"I don't know."

This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.

I work in IT, at my second full-time job at a small financial firm in Manhattan I would get at least 2-4 tickets a day that said "my computer doesn't work, please take a look" and 90% of the time it was one of two issues:

• The tower was off but the monitors were on

• The tower was on but the monitors were off

• Occasionally it was the Display Port to HDMI dongle became dislodged or bent which stopped the PC from POSTing (of course I didn't blame them for this one)

These people were in their 40s and didn't know how to press a fucking power button even though they had been using the same computer for years. Some would even say "I know the monitors are on because I see the yellow lights on it, but when I move the mouse nothing happens!". After about a month of this I would just say "Hi", press the power button, and then walk away shaking my head. This was in like 2016.

My dad was an electrician by trade and he would always tell me a story about how he was working at a nuclear power plant that was being built in the early 90s and the engineers didn't know how to turn on the PCs they worked on every day and he would have to show them.

I’m glad to hear you say ‘regardless of age’ as it really isn’t a generation thing. I’ve met people younger than myself and I’ve had to help them navigate some basic computer stuff. it doesn’t make it easier when they get very frustrated and transfer all their anger of computers at me like I alone have created computers everywhere to annoy everyone. “WHY ARE THESE LIKE THIS.??”

It feels like we just got past teaching the population that gender doesn’t matter when it comes to using computers and it’s like we have to go through all of it again to teach the population age doesn’t matter either.

You will find people of your own generation who really hate technology. they exist everywhere and you really see it when you’re in a support role. Maybe you didn’t meet them today but it doesn’t mean they aren’t out there bugging the heck out of someone else right now what with refusing to read some super basic error message or not remembering their own password.

They don’t know how to navigate file systems

that's a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.

“There’s an error message on my screen.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know.”

"I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I'm late on my project. Can't you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?"

You're in the same boat I am. I'm doing IT support and one user couldn't navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used "file open" dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word's open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.

It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn't even try to correct their methods. I was just like, "okay", and moved on.

It's not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things.... Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that's probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow.... They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not "get" that there's a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.

Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.

I hate hearing "I don't know computers" or "I'm not very good with technology" .... You use it every day. There's some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being "bad" with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.

The more infuriating cases were "I don't know, I pressed Enter".

We have an error message in our software. Basically telling the user that the device they're connecting to isn't there.

Over time, I can see all the additions that the developer has been told to make. Check the USB cable, check the power cable, make sure the device itself hasn't got an error message on it, to restart it, etc.

Not one of these additions has reduced the number of support calls, because nobody reads anything. And in fact adding more lines to the message probably makes it even less likely they will do so.

I got a JVC head in like 2002 that could play MP3 cds. I was the king.

I got a Sony CDP once that wouldn't play burned CDs. Not sure if it was a hardware issue with that one CDP, or if it affected the model itself. I returned it and got a different one and it works with burned CDs. To this day it's a mystery

Alright Scrooge McDuck driving your Rolls-Royce with a CD player, any car I could afford to drive still had a tape deck even by the time I had a phone to plug into it via an adapter!

Back then we could pull the factory radio out, and replace it with a new one. And it was easy.

I duplicated CDs for a while for the car, then bought a new car stereo that could play MP3s and condensed my collection onto 3 discs. I left the discs in the car when I sold it

My setup couldn't even do that. But hey I had a tape player...

They went that expensive at least by 2000, I put one in my 99' Neon for like 200$. It actually could play MP3 discs! I had one disc with a shit load of songs that was my default disc in the player.

I only ever made like 2 CDs that worked in my life. And I NEVER burned a DVD that worked.

Burning cd's for ripped movies/pirated games was mostly obsoleted by super cheap & huge hard drives, in combination with piracy mainly transitioning to downloads over the internet idue to increased bandwidth and removed caps (instead of physical sharing of medi). Price per byte for HDD storage decreased 1000x between 1995-2008. https://ourworldindata.org/...

Burning for cd audio/MP3 was obsoleted in favor of MP3 players/ipod and later the smartphone.

Funny anecdote; my friend's mother referred to the cd burner as "the cd crusher" in the late 90's, I guess it's easy to mix up the terms if one is oblivious to the fact that the information is burned into the disc by a laser.

Don't forget USB sticks and file storage services like DropBox.

CD burning was mostly dead by the mid-to-late naughties. Streaming came later.

The time between CD burners being uncommon nerd shit, and the iPod becoming ubiquitous, was a single digit number of years. I had a fairly early CD mp3 player (it could play red book audio discs and data discs with mp3s on them) plus I had a CD player in my truck, so I actually did burn a few discs in my day, but a lot of people went straight from buying albums on disc or tape to dragging and dropping files onto a hard drive or flash based mp3 player.

I had a fancy CD/DVD burner in my first laptop circa 2015 and used it very very sparingly. It also had a fancy feature where you could buy special disks that the burner could burn a cover imagine onto. It was crap.

The IPod killed CDs i think is pretty established

There were other attempts, like the Diamond Rio

But because of iTunes, the ipod made actually getting songs onto your device as easy as clicking a button and apple got into bed with the recording industry so they didnt get shut down hard like everyone else that came before them and you didnt have to be labelled a dirty pirate.

mp3s were quite disruptive and contentious ahh Napster

I'll never forget the chant:

"See-Dee Rahm, See-Dee Aye, See-Dee Are Plus, See-Dee Are Minus, Are Double-yew."

It was so popular you could walk into a Walmart and buy blank cds and put it into most computers that have a cd drive in the last 15 years and write it from Windows Media Player.

Even today you can still do it for cheap. USB external CD drive with write capabilities: $18.99

https://www.newegg.com/...

50 Blank CDs, $16.60 https://www.newegg.com/...

If you wanted to write to a CD more than once you could buy CD-RW's which had the ability to be formatted (wiped clean) and used again.

The hardware to write disks was so cheap it became standard. The cheapest of laptops or desktops would have the ability built in. example:

$168.99 - Cheap junk computer from Walmart (I would not recommend that computer, just figured it would show just how cheap a computer gets that has it built in) https://www.walmart.com/...

I suppose not everyone had the hardware to cut their own vinyl, so being able to stick the disky thingy in the bleep bloop machine and make your own diskies at home sounded kind of bizarre at first

I legit never reused a CD in my life. With how cheap CD-R was, I'd just buy a spindle and burner go brrrrrrrr.

You talkin' shit about my Iomega!?

Actually, that would be the less used DVD-RAM. It had sectors like HDD, and could be formatted with regular FSs, like HDD, and written to like HDD.

Poor DVD-RAM, people don't even include it in jokes anymore.

*twitch*

Good old C-x M-c M-Butterfly

Skips happened when someone bumped your elbow.

No /s, you literally described a laser imprinting a disc with data.

The cassette to aux converter felt like black magic back then. I left mine in so long that it made a creaking and snapping sound when I finally took it out when getting rid of the car.

I went minidisc of iPod, then a Zune.

I still think both were the best decisions of the time, but apparently no one else did.

But I think it was only like 4-5 minidiscs to get the same capacity as the first iPods.

Removable storage will always be a plus

'95 here. I not only burned disks, but we had one of them fancy schmancy monochrome label burner disk drives. So many MS Word font effects were burned that I'm sure I lost 20 IQ points from the plastic fumes.

I had a 64 MB Samsung Yepp mp3 player super early. Didn't stop me from burning CDs at all, considering the player could only store about one CD anyway.

I’m barely a millennial and I burned a few CDs. But yeah it was only a few and before I got a tape to aux connector for my car

Not sure whether I'm gen Z or millennial, but I definitely burned a lot of CDs. And successfully burned about 20% of them. If even the floor creaked the CD would skip and basically be destroyed.

I may not be the average experience for somebody my age though, considering when I was like 8 I remember using a tape recorder to record my favorite songs from the radio onto a cassette.

I was born in 2003 and I burnt my own CD. But I had a geeky dad and quite old hardware

I remember once Limewire became popular it was almost a magic trick to get a clean install of it. Most people I knew had a copy that came with all the toolbars and malware.

I had one radio that did all of this but if I didn't hold a fake adapter into the headphone port at exactly the right angle, nothing worked. I put so much effort into being very still to record songs.

I'm sure many of us did that. I would use a plug in microphone and put it up to the TV to record cartoon theme songs. I wish i still had that tape.

I can hear that clock! Omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm omm

I had one till the flippers broke.

I've got a nearly 20 year old cdrom drive that just keeps getting transfered from build to build because you never know. I don't think I've opened in like 3 years... I'm gonna see if it still does real quick.

Ok it does but there was a driver cd for a motherboard I don't own anymore in it.

I keep a Blu ray/DVD burner in a portable enclosure stored away just in case I want to play some of my older games. (I have a smallish retro game collection at this point in a CD rack in my bookshelf, as well as a few boxes copies. if anything it's cool to look at)

Or I need to burn something on the off chance I need to get data off of a really old computer that my grandparents own or something.

I even keep a cd album of turned recovery disk's for various operating systems. I have DVDs for reinstalling windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10, as well as a bunch of Linux live DVDs/CDs just in case. I always try the USB options first, but if they don't work I can always fall back on the CD/DVD. The portable drive guarantees I can use it even on a PC that doesn't have a drive (provided it's not too old - I don't own floppys because I don't have a FD drive)

He played the fiddle while ROM burned

He really whips the llamas ass... oh wrong program.

To explain my experience, I need this picture, but with a pirate carrying a copy of him.

They do fun things in the microwave too

Could You, please, elaborate? I have a Dremel, and I think I still have a CD lying around.

Do not cite the deep magic to me, Witch.

Might be the only perfect software ever created. It still works. We use at work for burning blurays and DVD for large datasets.

The creater also added tons of hilarious quotes and sass to it.

I used this and CDBurnerXP all the time.

Oooh noooo!

Sure mate, none of us looked up what the laser was doing. It's just magic.

A time when the height of mobile audio was an 8 track mounted under your three on the tree.

I didn't have a deck to deck, but somehow managed to convince my mom to buy me a bay mounted burner when they very first were hitting stores. There was a local video rental shop, that also rented out PC games for like $2 ea. I copied as many of those suckers as I could convince my parents to rent me over the course of that summer.

It was the program you pirate before pirating a bunch of others.

Alcohol

CD Burner XP was better, IMO.

They wanted to be smug about being young

AI is still pretty new. Perhaps not all of them have caught up with it yet.

Wait, what? Please explain this to me

What?

My uncle did this for years. He shared a subscription with a friend of his and ripped thousands of movies and gave copies to the whole family. Damn the 00's were wild.

Edit: Ooh do you remember CloneCD? https://clonecd.en.softonic.com/ I have that lamb icon burned into my brain

If you put them in the microwave for a few seconds they get this cool crackle effect on the shiny side. If you've got one of those old "skip repair" doohickeys that buffed it in a radial pattern that's nice too. Keep some plain for a nice contrast.

God I used to hate DJ's that would talk up to the post. Used to record all my music from the air from the late night DJ's because they would often just queue up a few songs with no talking.

I was behind a kid in Chipotle last week that had an honest to god Walkman on him with the original headphones. it seemed WAY larger than I remembered.

I remember giving the joystick port on my C64 a wet willy to activate cheat mode on a game. No, I'm not making that up.

Lmao I had a walkman, and I remember that the less power the batteries had, the slower the tape played. Sometimes I didn't even knew if the song was playing at full speed.

Ah, double decks with high speed copy...

I still get frustrated at this to this day lol

I remember feeling like a wizard when I discovered the MP3 CD format and the 100+ songs you could fit on a single disc.

Sometimes you had to burn them at like 1x instead of like 10x so even the oldest, shittiest players could read them. That was painful .

That box of dvds is your 99 potions left after beating the game

I remember getting a stack of unburned DVDs as a present.

it is a lost art now, I still have an unopened box of DVDs… Somewhere.

Same here. And a folder full of CD/DVD backups of old software.

To us people using sharpies... You were basically the Fonz.

"DON'T OPEN THE DOOR!"

Continues to open the door and snap it shut until the little spring breaks and the door comes off it's rails

Do you mean 5-1/4" ? While 7" did exist they were extremely rare outside of research academia/business and even then fairly rare. The main stream computers like the Apple IIe (in 82' ?) Came with 5-1/5" floppies. The IIe, being an extremely popular public school choice.

If you get an mp3 cd player, you can have hundreds of songs on a CD! Hundreds!

I tried that when I was 4 or so. When they said they're burning it, I wanted to try it too.

Fuck, some of the younger rappers actually put out mixtape cassettes now. There's a fairly brisk but low demand market for not only used tapes, but there's bands releasing them im special editions.

I'm kinda regretting dumping some of my old tapes. I kept the stuff that's impossible to replace (local bands mostly), but I sometimes get nostalgic for the liners. Not the sound being shitty, or how fast tapes wear out, or anything else about the format, but there was something coool about the way the liners unfolded that isn't as satisfying with CDs, or even vinyl.

Sell? I remember it as how to tell if someone fancied you :)

Do kids these days just make playlists and send links?!

Or the benefits of that sweet chromium oxide cassette tape...

I see you have no idea how this works...

You need a CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW drive in your computer, or externally to write to any of those formats. A DVD-RW can write, or burn (because the laser is literally burning the information onto the disk) to all four formats of disk.

A reasonable guess!

Some computer CD drives (They were called Burners at the start, but near the end most CD-rom drives would also burn CDs) would do it with software. It would eventually be nearly as easy as copying data to a USB drive.

Chances are you could put in a blank disc and the computer will present a folder as a representation of the disc. Copy whatever into the folder and click the burn button on the top right of the folder

Pressed CDs had holes (or "pits") in them. Burned CDs used the laser to change the color of a dye. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as cool as "zapping holes" in the disc.

The sparks mean it's working!