It weird being old enough to remember when CD readers were an expensive peripheral, to a standard piece of hardwere. Then back to being an accessory for a niche audience.
@@IkanGelamaKuning I'm still using a few I had laying around from a decade ago, I can't find any, either. Sounds stupid, but I still use a CD player in the car - I found myself fumbling with a Bluetooth-connected phone to be distracting.
I remember saving up $300 working at a movie theater for $4.25 an hour to get an external SCSI 4X CD burner for my Mac. I think it took me almost half a year.
I miss the tangible experience of all this stuff. Plugging in peripherals, inserting discs, maintaining a collection of media. Sharing discs. It was exciting and new.
I remember buying CD Racks of varying shapes, sizes and quantities. Plastic desktop ones, full shelf ones, just for CD-ROMs, and of course having CaseLogic cd-sleeve zipper cases for all those games to take to your friends' house!
The PowerCD really looks like it was meant to be removed from the base (like it's docked), but they couldn't fit the batteries and everything into the main unit, and so they fused both parts into one.
You could call it Apple PlayStation, insert a PS1 CD game, and see if it will run. Of course, it can be done, you just need the right hacker. Plenty out there online without college education. You would be surprised.
Oh man, I remember seeing one of these in my dentist's office as a kid. I believe they only used it for playing music. I had no idea that it could be hooked up to a computer or a TV. I don't think they did either... 😅. Thanks for that nostalgia trip!
I love these videos on old tech, I was born in 1992 and seeing things that was around when I was a kid in the 90s and comparing it to what my kids have now makes me realise how far tech has come in such a short time. Great content 🙂
I was in my early 20s at the time and I can tell you 85% of people didn't have any of this crap. PCs just were not common in the household. They were solutions to problems most people simply didn't have.
@@mrtelevision8079 No, it was largely based on income. The top 1 or 2% income wise had computers by the early 90s. The vast majority did not, especially not Macs. This is America which largely had the highest household penetration of computers.
Actually, I bought a PowerCD myself. I think it must have been heavily discounted by then, but for me it was a good choice as I didn't even have an audio CD player at that point. I enjoyed using it as a standalone CD player as well as hooking it up to my Performa 400. And... I still have it :-) !
Revisiting this video, I decided to look into the Philips CDF100 & found a service manual on WebArchive. In it I learned the Video DAC for this unit spits out Analog Y/U/V to the CXA1229 Encoder that spits out RGBS along with Composite & S-Video which means a modder could have far surpassed Composite or S-Video quality by intercepting Y/U/V from the DAC & doing a YPbPr output mod or an RGBS mod by tapping the relevant encoder output pins. The Audio DAC works on i2s(also created by Philips) so A modder could tap the relevant lines for use with a i2s to S/Pdif IC
So much time and energy spent on ways to look at series of photos that nobody ever ever wanted to sit and watch, unless they personally took them ( and not even always then)
Fantastic video. I know the focus of this video is the Macintosh and Mac Like Things, but I just wanted to add that the AppleCD SC, AppleCD 150, and PowerCD all worked well with the Apple IIgs and GS/OS, even included support for audio CD playback in GS/OS.
Seeing that Myst box really takes me back to when I had the game on CD for my 1994 Performa. Sometimes I wish I still had that computer but it was pretty bulky.
Was really surprised to see in the advert at 1:19 the mention of DAT as a backup source for data storage. I've only been familiar with it for audio recording, but this totally makes sense!
A company called Exabyte made external tape backup units that used DAT tapes. We used to use them to back up servers. They were kind of slow, but had huge capacity and small size compared to other tape backup products at the time.
My elementary school had those external CD drives for their Macintosh computers! Also I remember Kodak Photo CD, my cousin has them and he saved lots of old pictures. The Kodak Picture CD with JPEG was more popular and lot of DVD players read those CDs!
Photo CD didn't let you take your photos off the disk. The Picture CD was what the photo CD should have always been - it played on pretty much everything that read dvds (as it was just a variation on CD-Rom and DVD protocols) it displayed all the same ways picture CD did, and most importantly you could copy your pictures off the disk and do with them as you wished. Photo CD should have never been anything but an internal prototype of the Picture CD. The photo CD debacle cost KODAK so much money they were still writing off costs related to it into the late 2000s.
@@medes5597 yeah the Photo CDs had lots of shortcomings, since you couldn’t copy and share the photos to other people, they were just for viewing purposes on multimedia players! I wish Kodak just made the Picture CDs from the get go, it would’ve made Kodak more future-proof in digital photography! And I would’ve had those photos from my elementary school saved, because my group art project was on Photo CDs, and my teacher didn’t even copy the prints!
Actually Photo CD didn’t cost Kodak lots of money, since they didn’t actually manufacture the players, they were made by Phillips or Pioneer. Kodak only published the photos on the CDs.
(Lovely video, TDNC, as usual.) That Philips building in Eindhoven, NL is now a restaurant. And near it is the Philips Museum. It's all well worth a visit.
I remember reading about these in computer shopper back in the day, but I never knew anyone who owned these, including my high school who had a Mac lab, and they just used whatever came as standard with the machines, and called it a day till something broke.
I remember in the early ‘90s hearing that my school district bought a CD writer. At the time they were super expensive. Towards the end of the nineties, I got one for $300. I also remember the first time I saw a CD-ROM as it contained a library card catalog on it. It was so high tech. Little did I know, a decade and a half later, CD-ROMs would often be litter.
I had almost that same experience. First CD-ROM exposure was in a library with ancient 8086-based PS/2 and external 1x SCSI CD-ROMs. Then a friend's gadget-loving dad got one for their family 386. He showed my Jones in the Fast Lane, and it was like magic. I had a Commodore 64 at the time. A while later, I was taking a high school elective at a trade school, and they had a CD writer connected to a Mac. I went to the computer store and bought a couple blank CD-Rs (Kodak-branded, for about $11 each!) to make my own mix disc, and a copy for a girl I liked at the time. We had the Creative / Matsushita + SB16 multimedia kit, and it was the only CD-ROM drive I knew of at the time that had the ability to rip digital audio from CDs using a special DOS program. It took my entire hard drive to store an image of the new disc. I also designed a front and back insert for the case and printed it on a friend's color ink jet printer. It took some trial and error to get the WAV files off my IDE DOS-formatted hard drive, via a Pentium 90 at that school, to a SCSI hard disk that the Mac could read via a translation program. Then I had to convert the files to AIFF, one by one, going back and forth from my drive to the SCSI drive because of disk space limitations. Unfortunately, I was not successful. I'm not sure if the problem was with the CD writer, or the Mac app, or the SCSI transfer rate, but I went through both of my discs trying to get one to burn. They both failed early in the process, turning my mid 90's teenage $22 into a pair of shiny coasters. I tried again a while later with a friend-of-a-friend that had a burner. I was supposed to meet him in a parking lot of his night-shift job at a department store with a bag full of ZIP disks. He never showed up. A few months later, I finally got my own 2x CD-R / 1x CD-RW drive and burned my first mix CD. It was *UNREAL* loading a custom-written CD into my car's CD player and having it play back my own playlist of music.
11:52 Myst was my first ever computer game I got with my first ever computer (a Macintosh Performa 630CD), and even though I bought the remasters on Steam... I still to this day have no idea what I'm supposed to do in that game lol.
I have one! Bought it back at the turn of the century when everyone was dumping their pre-Intel Macs. Works great as a stand-along CD player, although I just use it as a display piece.
Watching videos explaining once-common multi-media history like it’s some alien technology to a younger audience makes me feel old. I forget that a lot of young people today don’t know about the history of tech.
PhotoCD was big with the US government. It was used for aerial photography from small aircraft, both for peacetime surveying and to oversee and document military training exercises. The state of New York also used it for surveying. It only died around 2000 or so.
I remember growing up, the evolution of all the mac computers and hardware my elementary school would buy throughout the years (1989-1997). They bought all the stuff discussed in this video and more.
I bought a Performa for $2K with an Apple Loan, and the first moment of happiness was the CD-ROM drive for $400 and I bought two titles, Myst and Peter Gabriel's Xplora 1 CD-ROMs. Nothing was ever the same after. And the speakers coupled with a subwoofer were fantastic for ages.
My first computer growing up was a Performa 600, so I'm very familiar with the drive caddy 😅 It was a cool machine for its time I suppose. I remember playing a lot of Kid Pix and Sim City 2000 on that thing. My parents bought it at Montgomery Ward and spent years paying that off...
This brings back memories. In the early 90s we had a Macintosh LC as the family computer and we got one of those bundles with the CD drive (one of the versions that used caddies) and the powered speakers as a Christmas gift. It was such a cool thing back then, a whole 650 MB on a single disk. And yep, I played Myst on my Mac LC thanks to that CD drive.
Same. Bearing in mind that at that time, we were lucky to have a 500MB hard drive, so running a game like Cosmic Osmo or Myst which took up more space than the entirety of the computer's main storage was absolutely amazing.
@@TimCortesi the LC’s internal drive was only 40 MB, so the CD’s 650 MB seemed massive. Plus having the game on one disk vs 5 or 6 floppies. We eventually added a 600 MB external SCSI drive, we thought we’d never run out of room.
I had a 486 PC from the early 90s that used this peculiar interface that connected directly to the soundcard. While I sold the machine before getting the CD-ROM drive working again, it still reminds me of how wonky the technology was until later in the decade.
Cd cards or using an interface on a soundcard was pretty common in early 90s. Creative sold packs with soundcard and drive in one package. I think the actual cd interface part was pretty cheap. It worked though.
I had mac with an external CD drive. Data worked as you would expect but to get audio, for example in a game, I had connect a separate audio cable from the drive to the computer's mic port and then set it as the audio source.
@@kirishima638 Yeah, the drive itself had the DAC as the manufacturer couldn't rely on the computer being powerful enough to process the audio-CD format. This was common even into the early 2000's with IDE drives as you might have to pull a separate cable for CD audio from the CD/DVD-ROM drive to your audio card in order to play audio-CD's (all internal, but still).
My family had a power cd for our performa 400. I think we hooked it up to the tv 1 or 2 times in total to view the rare (even at the time) photo cd one of which came in a bundle with the drive and was full of stock images
The computer lab at school had one of those CD SC drives with the caddy, hooked up to a Mac Plus… I think this would’ve been likely in the early 90’s, and at the time I was absolutely gobsmacked at just how fast you could change tracks on an audio CD with one of these CD-ROM drives, compared to the audio CD players of the day.
I went to an international school in Milan and in 1992 we had a bunch of Mac LC II computers and several CD 150 drives. I still have a caddy that I somehow ended up with for some reason.
Amiga was doing multimedia way before the Mac. Just look at the demo scene, graphical demos, music and so on. Macs around at that time were monochrome and had bleeps for sound.
Yeah, of people knew just a bit about Apple's image in the later 80s and 90s, they wouldn't every buy that overpriced shit from that unneeded enterprise xD
Amigas also crippled the art and desktop publishing market in favour of games and it's entirely their own fault no serious business would even entertain owning one for design work. Like saying "hey get an amiga for design work" to a boss back then would be like saying "hey get a PS5 for your design staff" to a ceo today. Commodore absolutely ruined their chance with a serious design market and no amount of "amiga did it first" will change that.
I liked the PowerCD because it uses the swing arm suspension for the optical block instead of the familiar linear sled-type pickup. Philips really wanted to push the swing arm design for CD but Sony preferred the sled (it was cheaper, mostly because the sleds were mostly just shrunken from existing Laserdisc systems but also because they didn't have to pay Philips royalties for the swing arm design). The swing arm couldn't've kept up with high-speed CDROM designs the way sled systems do (which is one reason the PowerCD was only 1x) so it would've gone by the wayside after a while anyway. The caddy-loading drives Apple used were all Sony models; Matsushita didn't come on the scene until the tray loaders, and even then Sony drives still had a presence in Macs, especially in the early years. Then Matsushita was most prevalent until the early '00s when other suppliers started edging in (typically Hitachi, LG, Toshiba, or Pioneer). The Performa 600 was the best of the nearly similar P600/IIvx/IIvi models. They were sort of like the Mustang of the era: you could get the terrible 4-banger (IIvi), the mediocre V6 (IIvx), or the 4.2 V8 (P600), all in the same body style. Continuing this analogy, the C650 would've been a 5.0, the Q650 a Cobra, and the PM7100 some sort of supercharged special edition.
The very first computer my school had with a CD ROM drive had the caddy for the discs. I think the only software at the start was an encyclopedia program. We had to sign up to use it and were limited to something like 15-30 minutes a turn.
For portable CD-ROM drives, the Panasonic KXL-D740 is hard to beat. Smaller, fits the Powerbook aesthetic, has SCSI output and works on batteries for a lot longer. I have managed to fill my collection with the Apple design speakers AND a AppleCD 600e, at long last - might look into seeing what other speaker drivers you can put into the enclosures for a bit of an audio boost.
My parents bought a proprietary CD-Rom drive for our Mac Performa back in the early 90s. I think it was $400. It was a SCSI drive. It allowed my brother and I to install games like Doom from CD Rom which was like so much better than Diskette versions. My 12 year old self was blown away by the full motion videos on educational software we had for as well. 🤩 My parents got rid of our old Mac stuff once we got a PC in the late 90s. Sad now that these retro computers and accessories are coveted by collectors.
I've said it before but that was such an exciting time in PC and Mac computing. CD Rom speeds started off as a clunky and expensive 1x read rate, and it seemed every year from 92-93 on, we started to receive the 2x, 4x and 8x drive speeds along with lower prices. Then the whole pace repeated with the advent of writable CD Roms.
Now you can get a DVD burner for $20 or thereabouts that connects via USB-C. When you're not using it, it goes in the drawer. It's an accessory at best, not a fundamental part of the computer. It should work on an Android phone as well, might even work on an iPhone, provided you have some software that could read it (VLC should suffice). Not sure about burning, I've never heard of a mobile phone burning discs, but it's theoretically possible as long as the burning software can run uninterrupted when the phone goes to sleep and locks. It's amazing how far we've come. I remember buying a 2x internal CD burner for around $330 in the late 90s/early 00s.
I love your content! I'm a relatively new subscriber but I especially love the videos you've put out covering old Macintosh hardware. My first computer was a 33Mhz Macintosh Performa 630CD so the nostalgia hits me just right.
I inherited a PowerCD with my aunt's old PowerBook 145, I think it was. Used it as my main hifi CD player for years until it finally died in probably 2006
I would have loved to see Apple make the 1992 concept CD-ROM/boombox "Heavy Metal" into a real product. (It can be seen on page 172 in the book "AppleDesign: The work of the Apple Industrial Design Group", highly recommended and a fascinating read.)
Neat video colin! I remember an apple household of a school friend who had long updated to G3s etc but his mum bought caddys for ALL discs thinking they were superior protection. Even though we had to open caddies and put into regular drives or slot load iMacs
I wish I had Myst back then! I had a Performa 6220CD at home and I assumed that most games were PC only (and I wasn't really into gaming) but I would have loved Myst.
I remember getting the use of the company’s only CD-R writer to create a multimedia Access database for contract info. Mid 90’s? Anyway it worked but was waay ahead of its time and was ignored/not understood by the higher ups that had spent the previous decade transitioning away from typewriters.
I had the Power PC CD player. It was actually quite decent, though I never used the more advanced functionality. That it took batteries is something I didn’t even remember, just that you could detach the unit from the base. Hell, I don’t think I ever connected it to a computer.
Ive been watching you videos lately, and i really like your content! very interesting to look back at old technology and how lifestyles were different to what we are used to. I prefer this kind of documentary / opinion / exploring old technology content rather than repair videos though. Have a great day!!
It would definitely not have survived in the era of 8x and faster drives. Way too much mechanical nonsense in there, and nowhere close to the tolerances of balanced spindles and dynamically-weighted clamps that became standard. :-D
I was still using Amigas when these things were released. Around that time I bought an external 1X NEC drive (External Top Loading) and a driver system (AsimCDFS) for the Amiga to be able to read the disks. Not nearly as cool looking, but I was able to read the "Syndesis 3D ROM" disk that had an object that I made in Imagine 3D. I'm not sure where that CD drive is today. I don't think I tossed it out. My first Apple purchase was a Newton Message Pad. A strange way to enter the fold…
My speakers are still working, CD Rom too, I replaced the drive though, 6x, don't remember the brand. I'm just waiting for a pi-storm version compatible with Macs to bring my LCIII to life. I bought the kit.
It wasn't too bad at first. But, the industry was really struggling over what to use all that space for. The go-to example was a reference library of some sort, like an encyclopedia. You could really see the "solution looking for a problem" process at first, if you watch old Computer Chronicles episodes and see the early demonstrations. Hey, wouldn't you rather use a computer to look up phone numbers all over the US, than resort to a phone book that just had your city's numbers listed? Of course! Who _wouldn't_ want to have the number for a pizzeria on the other side of the continent? For the time, where it was mostly databases of text and minor graphics, even a 1x transfer rate was pretty decent. It was really just a miracle to have access to that volume of data _at all._ When things started moving to multimedia (realtime-playback of FMVs, or installing lots of graphics and audio data to the hard disk), then the higher-speed drives really came into their own.
Do you remember a raid desktop multiple drive backup system. I’m thinking Lacie. The two drives could be removed from the top like toast in a toaster. They were styled in Art Deco design. Had one w my IMac G4.
I have a feeling that most PowerCD owners didn't even connect the thing to their Mac. The very few times I saw one back in the day, it was sitting on the shelf next to speakers, several metres from the owner's Mac.
I never understood the caddy, i just assumed it was some required of the design. I have 1 caddy at home, that we used for all CDs but i recall the school library have one for each CD and think it was a side product that protect CDs and the the original design.
Same! I didn't realise that it was intended to minimise handling. I guess that makes sense, but who would pay $9 just to be able to store a disc - WITHOUT any place to store the accompanying booklet or cover art? No, I remember everyone had just one caddy, that's it.
I wish that we had a ISO standard for caddies and software was shipped in those caddies. I feel that we took a massive step back by not making caddies the standard. Imagine Movie rentals, netflix, red box DVDs never being scratched.
I kind of forgot that while you needed the hardware to drive it for a while the storage space and read speeds of CD's greatly expanded the potential of PC's multimedia capabilites . . . ain't nobody would keep 700mb of data containing what was on a CD until the 2000s uncompressed.
I have the Apple Design Speakers on my Retro 6500/300 build. The Power CD I remember when I worked at CompUSA those were always looked at and picked up but never bought. It was a single speed unit, The Apple Multimedia Kit with the external CD drive was a double speed unit and the kit had the Apple Design Speakers as well in the box. A lot of Apple stuff in the 90's was way cool, way ahead of it's time and way too expensive for what it was. I think Bose did the Apple Design speakers.
Funny, I still have a box w/ about 100 caddies in it! About 25 years ago, some guy was sellin' 'em at the MIT flea market. I made an offer for the whole box.
I have second hand Apple Power CD and it's hard to decide what to do with it. It doesn't read 1 out of 5 CDs. But for the ones it reads, the audio quality is very good. Any suggestion what is causing some cds not to be readable?
the apple pippin was the best epic macintosh product ever of the 90s. why don't you come out with another console apple. the x-box's of the world need the competition :(
It weird being old enough to remember when CD readers were an expensive peripheral, to a standard piece of hardwere. Then back to being an accessory for a niche audience.
Yep. I'm in that niche audience.
I cant find any single cdrw disk in market these days. All of them gone. Mostly cdr & dvdr/w on the shelf.
@@IkanGelamaKuning amazon has cd-rw they're cheap as hell
@@IkanGelamaKuning ...have you only looked at Best Buy or Walmart in store?
@@IkanGelamaKuning I'm still using a few I had laying around from a decade ago, I can't find any, either. Sounds stupid, but I still use a CD player in the car - I found myself fumbling with a Bluetooth-connected phone to be distracting.
I remember saving up $300 working at a movie theater for $4.25 an hour to get an external SCSI 4X CD burner for my Mac. I think it took me almost half a year.
Mate your monthly salary was $680 if I assume you worked 8 hours every day except the weekends. How did it take you 6 months to save up for it???
@@MateoTheProI assume they either didn't work full time or they had other expenses (ie Gas) they had to cover
I miss the tangible experience of all this stuff. Plugging in peripherals, inserting discs, maintaining a collection of media. Sharing discs. It was exciting and new.
I remember buying CD Racks of varying shapes, sizes and quantities. Plastic desktop ones, full shelf ones, just for CD-ROMs, and of course having CaseLogic cd-sleeve zipper cases for all those games to take to your friends' house!
@@aeonjoey3d I recently bought stacks of plastic disk cases for my 3.5' floppies and zip disks!
wired for the win i found out even cheap wired headphone have better microphones the cheap wireless
@@aeonjoey3d My desk had a built-in CD rack!
How stupid are we to let all that fun disappear from our lives?
The external Apple CDROM with a tray still looks incredibly appealing to me.
The PowerCD really looks like it was meant to be removed from the base (like it's docked), but they couldn't fit the batteries and everything into the main unit, and so they fused both parts into one.
Jony Ive must have been sitting there, seething. "Someday, they'll listen to me"
It does, you slide a latch on the back and it lifts off, but yeah it's pretty useless undocked.
You could call it Apple PlayStation, insert a PS1 CD game, and see if it will run. Of course, it can be done, you just need the right hacker. Plenty out there online without college education. You would be surprised.
It has the WiiU's 'we know what we want to do but the technology isn't there yet' energy.
@@techmaester need the right cpu for virtualisation or good enough cpu and code for emulation
Oh man, I remember seeing one of these in my dentist's office as a kid. I believe they only used it for playing music. I had no idea that it could be hooked up to a computer or a TV. I don't think they did either... 😅. Thanks for that nostalgia trip!
I love these videos on old tech, I was born in 1992 and seeing things that was around when I was a kid in the 90s and comparing it to what my kids have now makes me realise how far tech has come in such a short time. Great content 🙂
I was in my early 20s at the time and I can tell you 85% of people didn't have any of this crap. PCs just were not common in the household. They were solutions to problems most people simply didn't have.
@@tarstarkusz depends on where you were in the world.
@@mrtelevision8079 No, it was largely based on income. The top 1 or 2% income wise had computers by the early 90s. The vast majority did not, especially not Macs. This is America which largely had the highest household penetration of computers.
Actually, I bought a PowerCD myself. I think it must have been heavily discounted by then, but for me it was a good choice as I didn't even have an audio CD player at that point. I enjoyed using it as a standalone CD player as well as hooking it up to my Performa 400. And... I still have it :-) !
I worked in sales at Apple through the 90s, and had completely forgotten about PowerCD. Thanks for a fun trip down memory lane on that one!
Revisiting this video, I decided to look into the Philips CDF100 & found a service manual on WebArchive. In it I learned the Video DAC for this unit spits out Analog Y/U/V to the CXA1229 Encoder that spits out RGBS along with Composite & S-Video which means a modder could have far surpassed Composite or S-Video quality by intercepting Y/U/V from the DAC & doing a YPbPr output mod or an RGBS mod by tapping the relevant encoder output pins.
The Audio DAC works on i2s(also created by Philips) so A modder could tap the relevant lines for use with a i2s to S/Pdif IC
So much time and energy spent on ways to look at series of photos that nobody ever ever wanted to sit and watch, unless they personally took them ( and not even always then)
I'll thank you to stop dissing on the CD caddy. They were great toys for kids (I know as I was one!)!
Fantastic video. I know the focus of this video is the Macintosh and Mac Like Things, but I just wanted to add that the AppleCD SC, AppleCD 150, and PowerCD all worked well with the Apple IIgs and GS/OS, even included support for audio CD playback in GS/OS.
Seeing that Myst box really takes me back to when I had the game on CD for my 1994 Performa. Sometimes I wish I still had that computer but it was pretty bulky.
Was really surprised to see in the advert at 1:19 the mention of DAT as a backup source for data storage. I've only been familiar with it for audio recording, but this totally makes sense!
A company called Exabyte made external tape backup units that used DAT tapes. We used to use them to back up servers. They were kind of slow, but had huge capacity and small size compared to other tape backup products at the time.
My elementary school had those external CD drives for their Macintosh computers! Also I remember Kodak Photo CD, my cousin has them and he saved lots of old pictures. The Kodak Picture CD with JPEG was more popular and lot of DVD players read those CDs!
Photo CD didn't let you take your photos off the disk. The Picture CD was what the photo CD should have always been - it played on pretty much everything that read dvds (as it was just a variation on CD-Rom and DVD protocols) it displayed all the same ways picture CD did, and most importantly you could copy your pictures off the disk and do with them as you wished. Photo CD should have never been anything but an internal prototype of the Picture CD. The photo CD debacle cost KODAK so much money they were still writing off costs related to it into the late 2000s.
@@medes5597 yeah the Photo CDs had lots of shortcomings, since you couldn’t copy and share the photos to other people, they were just for viewing purposes on multimedia players! I wish Kodak just made the Picture CDs from the get go, it would’ve made Kodak more future-proof in digital photography! And I would’ve had those photos from my elementary school saved, because my group art project was on Photo CDs, and my teacher didn’t even copy the prints!
Actually Photo CD didn’t cost Kodak lots of money, since they didn’t actually manufacture the players, they were made by Phillips or Pioneer. Kodak only published the photos on the CDs.
I had one of those CD drives the Power CD and used it as a book shelf unit for years afterwards
(Lovely video, TDNC, as usual.) That Philips building in Eindhoven, NL is now a restaurant. And near it is the Philips Museum. It's all well worth a visit.
I remember reading about these in computer shopper back in the day, but I never knew anyone who owned these, including my high school who had a Mac lab, and they just used whatever came as standard with the machines, and called it a day till something broke.
I remember in the early ‘90s hearing that my school district bought a CD writer. At the time they were super expensive. Towards the end of the nineties, I got one for $300. I also remember the first time I saw a CD-ROM as it contained a library card catalog on it. It was so high tech. Little did I know, a decade and a half later, CD-ROMs would often be litter.
I had almost that same experience. First CD-ROM exposure was in a library with ancient 8086-based PS/2 and external 1x SCSI CD-ROMs. Then a friend's gadget-loving dad got one for their family 386. He showed my Jones in the Fast Lane, and it was like magic. I had a Commodore 64 at the time.
A while later, I was taking a high school elective at a trade school, and they had a CD writer connected to a Mac. I went to the computer store and bought a couple blank CD-Rs (Kodak-branded, for about $11 each!) to make my own mix disc, and a copy for a girl I liked at the time.
We had the Creative / Matsushita + SB16 multimedia kit, and it was the only CD-ROM drive I knew of at the time that had the ability to rip digital audio from CDs using a special DOS program. It took my entire hard drive to store an image of the new disc. I also designed a front and back insert for the case and printed it on a friend's color ink jet printer.
It took some trial and error to get the WAV files off my IDE DOS-formatted hard drive, via a Pentium 90 at that school, to a SCSI hard disk that the Mac could read via a translation program. Then I had to convert the files to AIFF, one by one, going back and forth from my drive to the SCSI drive because of disk space limitations.
Unfortunately, I was not successful. I'm not sure if the problem was with the CD writer, or the Mac app, or the SCSI transfer rate, but I went through both of my discs trying to get one to burn. They both failed early in the process, turning my mid 90's teenage $22 into a pair of shiny coasters.
I tried again a while later with a friend-of-a-friend that had a burner. I was supposed to meet him in a parking lot of his night-shift job at a department store with a bag full of ZIP disks. He never showed up.
A few months later, I finally got my own 2x CD-R / 1x CD-RW drive and burned my first mix CD. It was *UNREAL* loading a custom-written CD into my car's CD player and having it play back my own playlist of music.
You can take a PS1 game and burn to a standard CD-R, and will be read in a PlayStation. At a time when Napster got into hairy copyright problems...
@@techmaester only if chipped, most were 😀
11:52 Myst was my first ever computer game I got with my first ever computer (a Macintosh Performa 630CD), and even though I bought the remasters on Steam... I still to this day have no idea what I'm supposed to do in that game lol.
I have one! Bought it back at the turn of the century when everyone was dumping their pre-Intel Macs.
Works great as a stand-along CD player, although I just use it as a display piece.
Watching videos explaining once-common multi-media history like it’s some alien technology to a younger audience makes me feel old. I forget that a lot of young people today don’t know about the history of tech.
PhotoCD was big with the US government. It was used for aerial photography from small aircraft, both for peacetime surveying and to oversee and document military training exercises. The state of New York also used it for surveying. It only died around 2000 or so.
I remember growing up, the evolution of all the mac computers and hardware my elementary school would buy throughout the years (1989-1997). They bought all the stuff discussed in this video and more.
I bought a Performa for $2K with an Apple Loan, and the first moment of happiness was the CD-ROM drive for $400 and I bought two titles, Myst and Peter Gabriel's Xplora 1 CD-ROMs. Nothing was ever the same after. And the speakers coupled with a subwoofer were fantastic for ages.
Colin, your peaceful voice and nice narrative of computers history makes me live, thank you! 👍
I used the SCSI CD-ROM drive back in the day for my MPC2000 drum machine. Good times.
My first computer growing up was a Performa 600, so I'm very familiar with the drive caddy 😅 It was a cool machine for its time I suppose. I remember playing a lot of Kid Pix and Sim City 2000 on that thing. My parents bought it at Montgomery Ward and spent years paying that off...
This brings back memories. In the early 90s we had a Macintosh LC as the family computer and we got one of those bundles with the CD drive (one of the versions that used caddies) and the powered speakers as a Christmas gift. It was such a cool thing back then, a whole 650 MB on a single disk. And yep, I played Myst on my Mac LC thanks to that CD drive.
Same. Bearing in mind that at that time, we were lucky to have a 500MB hard drive, so running a game like Cosmic Osmo or Myst which took up more space than the entirety of the computer's main storage was absolutely amazing.
@@TimCortesi the LC’s internal drive was only 40 MB, so the CD’s 650 MB seemed massive. Plus having the game on one disk vs 5 or 6 floppies. We eventually added a 600 MB external SCSI drive, we thought we’d never run out of room.
I had a 486 PC from the early 90s that used this peculiar interface that connected directly to the soundcard. While I sold the machine before getting the CD-ROM drive working again, it still reminds me of how wonky the technology was until later in the decade.
How could you write all that in like 21 seconds?
@@michaelpastras Patreon supporters get early access to videos.
Cd cards or using an interface on a soundcard was pretty common in early 90s.
Creative sold packs with soundcard and drive in one package. I think the actual cd interface part was pretty cheap. It worked though.
I had mac with an external CD drive. Data worked as you would expect but to get audio, for example in a game, I had connect a separate audio cable from the drive to the computer's mic port and then set it as the audio source.
@@kirishima638 Yeah, the drive itself had the DAC as the manufacturer couldn't rely on the computer being powerful enough to process the audio-CD format. This was common even into the early 2000's with IDE drives as you might have to pull a separate cable for CD audio from the CD/DVD-ROM drive to your audio card in order to play audio-CD's (all internal, but still).
My family had a power cd for our performa 400. I think we hooked it up to the tv 1 or 2 times in total to view the rare (even at the time) photo cd one of which came in a bundle with the drive and was full of stock images
I never knew about the Philips and and Kodak branded versions of the PowerCD. Even if it was impractical, it still looks fantastic.
The computer lab at school had one of those CD SC drives with the caddy, hooked up to a Mac Plus… I think this would’ve been likely in the early 90’s, and at the time I was absolutely gobsmacked at just how fast you could change tracks on an audio CD with one of these CD-ROM drives, compared to the audio CD players of the day.
I went to an international school in Milan and in 1992 we had a bunch of Mac LC II computers and several CD 150 drives. I still have a caddy that I somehow ended up with for some reason.
I used to have the "Multimedia Kit" and the speakers were amazing for the size... up there with the current HomePods.
5:36 OMG WACKY JACKS! I can't tell you how many hours I sunk into that game during the 7th grade lol!
Amiga was doing multimedia way before the Mac. Just look at the demo scene, graphical demos, music and so on. Macs around at that time were monochrome and had bleeps for sound.
Yeah, of people knew just a bit about Apple's image in the later 80s and 90s, they wouldn't every buy that overpriced shit from that unneeded enterprise xD
Amigas also crippled the art and desktop publishing market in favour of games and it's entirely their own fault no serious business would even entertain owning one for design work.
Like saying "hey get an amiga for design work" to a boss back then would be like saying "hey get a PS5 for your design staff" to a ceo today. Commodore absolutely ruined their chance with a serious design market and no amount of "amiga did it first" will change that.
I liked the PowerCD because it uses the swing arm suspension for the optical block instead of the familiar linear sled-type pickup. Philips really wanted to push the swing arm design for CD but Sony preferred the sled (it was cheaper, mostly because the sleds were mostly just shrunken from existing Laserdisc systems but also because they didn't have to pay Philips royalties for the swing arm design). The swing arm couldn't've kept up with high-speed CDROM designs the way sled systems do (which is one reason the PowerCD was only 1x) so it would've gone by the wayside after a while anyway.
The caddy-loading drives Apple used were all Sony models; Matsushita didn't come on the scene until the tray loaders, and even then Sony drives still had a presence in Macs, especially in the early years. Then Matsushita was most prevalent until the early '00s when other suppliers started edging in (typically Hitachi, LG, Toshiba, or Pioneer).
The Performa 600 was the best of the nearly similar P600/IIvx/IIvi models. They were sort of like the Mustang of the era: you could get the terrible 4-banger (IIvi), the mediocre V6 (IIvx), or the 4.2 V8 (P600), all in the same body style. Continuing this analogy, the C650 would've been a 5.0, the Q650 a Cobra, and the PM7100 some sort of supercharged special edition.
Wow, thanks for the info 🌞👍🏻
I think the swing arm design was less amenable to miniaturization, as well.
The very first computer my school had with a CD ROM drive had the caddy for the discs. I think the only software at the start was an encyclopedia program. We had to sign up to use it and were limited to something like 15-30 minutes a turn.
For portable CD-ROM drives, the Panasonic KXL-D740 is hard to beat. Smaller, fits the Powerbook aesthetic, has SCSI output and works on batteries for a lot longer.
I have managed to fill my collection with the Apple design speakers AND a AppleCD 600e, at long last - might look into seeing what other speaker drivers you can put into the enclosures for a bit of an audio boost.
My parents bought a proprietary CD-Rom drive for our Mac Performa back in the early 90s. I think it was $400. It was a SCSI drive. It allowed my brother and I to install games like Doom from CD Rom which was like so much better than Diskette versions. My 12 year old self was blown away by the full motion videos on educational software we had for as well. 🤩
My parents got rid of our old Mac stuff once we got a PC in the late 90s. Sad now that these retro computers and accessories are coveted by collectors.
Thats what I have for my Mac Color Classic ( Speakers and CD 300i ) and Subwoofer. Love it.
I've said it before but that was such an exciting time in PC and Mac computing. CD Rom speeds started off as a clunky and expensive 1x read rate, and it seemed every year from 92-93 on, we started to receive the 2x, 4x and 8x drive speeds along with lower prices. Then the whole pace repeated with the advent of writable CD Roms.
Now you can get a DVD burner for $20 or thereabouts that connects via USB-C. When you're not using it, it goes in the drawer. It's an accessory at best, not a fundamental part of the computer. It should work on an Android phone as well, might even work on an iPhone, provided you have some software that could read it (VLC should suffice). Not sure about burning, I've never heard of a mobile phone burning discs, but it's theoretically possible as long as the burning software can run uninterrupted when the phone goes to sleep and locks.
It's amazing how far we've come. I remember buying a 2x internal CD burner for around $330 in the late 90s/early 00s.
I actually love the aesthetic of the Disc Caddy. We need to bring back Disc Caddies
I remember using an Apple CD Caddy drive, in school, around 1995-97.
I still remember when my dad bought our first multimedia bundle; it was from Creative, if I remember correctly. It felt SO futuristic, hehehe
I love your content! I'm a relatively new subscriber but I especially love the videos you've put out covering old Macintosh hardware. My first computer was a 33Mhz Macintosh Performa 630CD so the nostalgia hits me just right.
I inherited a PowerCD with my aunt's old PowerBook 145, I think it was. Used it as my main hifi CD player for years until it finally died in probably 2006
I remember most of these things, as I owned some of them back in the day. I also remember the One scanner too!! 🙂
I would have loved to see Apple make the 1992 concept CD-ROM/boombox "Heavy Metal" into a real product. (It can be seen on page 172 in the book "AppleDesign: The work of the Apple Industrial Design Group", highly recommended and a fascinating read.)
What a trip down memory lane!
The Apple PowerCD was the multimedia focused CD-i. (6:40)
I have one of the external apple dvd rom drives and I flashed it region free. Been a LONG time since I used it. I got it at a Value Village.
Neat video colin! I remember an apple household of a school friend who had long updated to G3s etc but his mum bought caddys for ALL discs thinking they were superior protection. Even though we had to open caddies and put into regular drives or slot load iMacs
I wish I had Myst back then! I had a Performa 6220CD at home and I assumed that most games were PC only (and I wasn't really into gaming) but I would have loved Myst.
Myst was originally built on and for Macintosh, the Windows port came a bit later.
11:26 can we talk about how cool that monitor is
(11:02) Yep, and if I recall correctly, at the time, physical photo albums were more portable and easier to show to other people.
I miss the 90s so so much. You just don't see neat shit like this anymore
Oooo I hope you go into 2000’s apple accessories. I’m a die hard Apple Power Speakers fan
I still have my MYST cd at home that i used to play in my Performa 5200
The overprice practice, a norm to apple since begining.
I had one of these CD players for a while. The one thing I never had was a Pippen gaming machine.
I remember getting the use of the company’s only CD-R writer to create a multimedia Access database for contract info. Mid 90’s? Anyway it worked but was waay ahead of its time and was ignored/not understood by the higher ups that had spent the previous decade transitioning away from typewriters.
I had the Power PC CD player. It was actually quite decent, though I never used the more advanced functionality. That it took batteries is something I didn’t even remember, just that you could detach the unit from the base. Hell, I don’t think I ever connected it to a computer.
Ive been watching you videos lately, and i really like your content! very interesting to look back at old technology and how lifestyles were different to what we are used to. I prefer this kind of documentary / opinion / exploring old technology content rather than repair videos though. Have a great day!!
Grey>blue. That PowerCD makes me feel things.
It's very cool to see products I never knew existed. The disc caddy seemed like a neat idea aesthetically but I am glad that never took off.
It would definitely not have survived in the era of 8x and faster drives. Way too much mechanical nonsense in there, and nowhere close to the tolerances of balanced spindles and dynamically-weighted clamps that became standard. :-D
I still have the Altec Lansing ACS 22 computer speakers, and their design is nearly identical to the Apple Speakers in the beginning of the video
I was still using Amigas when these things were released. Around that time I bought an external 1X NEC drive (External Top Loading) and a driver system (AsimCDFS) for the Amiga to be able to read the disks. Not nearly as cool looking, but I was able to read the "Syndesis 3D ROM" disk that had an object that I made in Imagine 3D. I'm not sure where that CD drive is today. I don't think I tossed it out. My first Apple purchase was a Newton Message Pad. A strange way to enter the fold…
My speakers are still working, CD Rom too, I replaced the drive though, 6x, don't remember the brand. I'm just waiting for a pi-storm version compatible with Macs to bring my LCIII to life. I bought the kit.
When looking at prices from the 90’s remember to adjust the prices for inflation by multiplying by a factor of 3.
A single-speed CDROM yikes... my first computer was a Macintosh Performa with a 2x CDROM and I recall how painful that was.
It wasn't too bad at first. But, the industry was really struggling over what to use all that space for. The go-to example was a reference library of some sort, like an encyclopedia.
You could really see the "solution looking for a problem" process at first, if you watch old Computer Chronicles episodes and see the early demonstrations. Hey, wouldn't you rather use a computer to look up phone numbers all over the US, than resort to a phone book that just had your city's numbers listed? Of course! Who _wouldn't_ want to have the number for a pizzeria on the other side of the continent?
For the time, where it was mostly databases of text and minor graphics, even a 1x transfer rate was pretty decent. It was really just a miracle to have access to that volume of data _at all._
When things started moving to multimedia (realtime-playback of FMVs, or installing lots of graphics and audio data to the hard disk), then the higher-speed drives really came into their own.
Do you remember a raid desktop multiple drive backup system. I’m thinking Lacie. The two drives could be removed from the top like toast in a toaster. They were styled in Art Deco design. Had one w my IMac G4.
Ah, another gadget I had no idea existed. Great video! Trying to hunt one of these down now is easier said than done!
This was very interesting. I didn't know about these Apple products from back in the day.
I have a feeling that most PowerCD owners didn't even connect the thing to their Mac. The very few times I saw one back in the day, it was sitting on the shelf next to speakers, several metres from the owner's Mac.
I laughed out loud when you first showed the Power CD! Hindsight I know but sheesh. 🤭
I never understood the caddy, i just assumed it was some required of the design. I have 1 caddy at home, that we used for all CDs but i recall the school library have one for each CD and think it was a side product that protect CDs and the the original design.
Same! I didn't realise that it was intended to minimise handling. I guess that makes sense, but who would pay $9 just to be able to store a disc - WITHOUT any place to store the accompanying booklet or cover art? No, I remember everyone had just one caddy, that's it.
I remember a friend made tons of many burning music CDs in the early days
I wish that we had a ISO standard for caddies and software was shipped in those caddies. I feel that we took a massive step back by not making caddies the standard. Imagine Movie rentals, netflix, red box DVDs never being scratched.
I kind of forgot that while you needed the hardware to drive it for a while the storage space and read speeds of CD's greatly expanded the potential of PC's multimedia capabilites . . . ain't nobody would keep 700mb of data containing what was on a CD until the 2000s uncompressed.
I have the Apple Design Speakers on my Retro 6500/300 build. The Power CD I remember when I worked at CompUSA those were always looked at and picked up but never bought. It was a single speed unit, The Apple Multimedia Kit with the external CD drive was a double speed unit and the kit had the Apple Design Speakers as well in the box. A lot of Apple stuff in the 90's was way cool, way ahead of it's time and way too expensive for what it was. I think Bose did the Apple Design speakers.
The school I went with had a bunch of those drives with software to help students get up to speed.
Fantastic video! Thanks Collin! 💜
I remember going over to my friends house and his dad had one of these baby’s I was super jealous lol
My aunti still own the PowerCD aaaaaaand is still using it when she wants to watch photos on the big screen :D
PhotoCD was such a missed opportunity - it was just so expensive to have a disc made that it was never worth it :(
I recall we had an app from Kodak for extracting full resolution TIFF's of the images on the photo CD for publishing and it cost $
Funny, I still have a box w/ about 100 caddies in it! About 25 years ago, some guy was sellin' 'em at the MIT flea market. I made an offer for the whole box.
Crazy to think about how CD players were once literal status symbols back in the day.
And here I am now with my M1 MacBook Air and a USB SuperDrive that I use on both the MacBook and my PC. How things change and come back around!
Can you be a bit more excited for what you are talking about/ this passion we all share? 0:57 🤣🤣 All in All, Great Video tho! 👍 haha
I had a performa with the cd caddy. I just swapped the discs out to be honest.
Great video :D
I have second hand Apple Power CD and it's hard to decide what to do with it. It doesn't read 1 out of 5 CDs. But for the ones it reads, the audio quality is very good. Any suggestion what is causing some cds not to be readable?
Oh dear, now seeing the Philips one it makes so much more sense of the odd shape, it's so Philips like indeed, how didn't I see this?
This is them before being an anti consumer... So many innovation...
the apple pippin was the best epic macintosh product ever of the 90s. why don't you come out with another console apple. the x-box's of the world need the competition :(