This CompUSA Disc Dispenser Exists
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- Опубликовано: 21 дек 2022
- Seems I purchased another new old stock thing from Comp USA, this one being a media dispenser for blank CD-R and DVD-R discs. Pointless? Useful? Perhaps a little of both. It sure does exist though.
I own and use one of these. I don't burn discs as often as I used to so it largely sits there. But when I need one, I hit that little lever and there's the disc. It solved no problem but it's cool anyway.
"Solves no problem but it's cool anyway" sums up a LOT of a my collection
@@LGRBlerbs understatement of the year hahaha 🤣👍🏻
@@LGRBlerbs Isn't that the concept of LGR Blerbs? 😅😆
"It solved no problem but it's cool anyway" this is probably an honest tagline for bunch of products
It DOES solve a problem though, and that's wasted time, in a sense.
The "problem" you're solving is the few extra seconds it would take to:
-remove lid from spindle
-remove a single disc from said spindle
-put lid back onto spindle
Instead, you just press the button and you have a disc.
It's not a LOT of wasted time, but it's still wasted time as opposed to this product.
I had a teacher with one of these EXACT models from CompUSA. It was for a class where every 2 weeks we would take a Friday class session to review, critique, and do a copy/burn backup of our project work. They had a 100pack of Verbatim CD+Rs that we would churn through often. They had this dispenser for them and it was SUPER handy to not have to pick up the stack (especially when full) from a shelf, open jankingly, and place back. This would sit in the same spot and each of us students would just flip and pick up a disc from the dispenser.
This was about 2003 I believe and the burners were in, beleive it or not, old Mac G4 cubes!
Thanks for giving me a trip down memory lane.
My teacher had one with a different brand name. It was the exact same product though.
I think this would only be really useful in school or business situations.
Perfect scenario for this product (aside from small businnesses) I was wondering who would need this but thanks to your explanation I totally get it!
@@clairekholin6935 piracy
We didn't have anything like this where I went to school, but that or a public library was the exact use case when I first saw this.
A nerd feeder. (Yes, it reminds me of those pet food dispensers) Schedule your computer nerd's ripping needs by setting times for a cd or dvd to pop out the bottom. Fun for everyone!
That name should be trademarked!
nerd feeder, patent pending
@@cmdraftbrn *pended
Imagine it sounding in your head with Clint's voice. Neat! :)
And every time you dispense a disc, Clint's duke voice over plays. Come get some, who wants some, damn those alien bastards are gonna pay for burning up my cd-r's
For some reason the first thing this brought to mind was those Ninja Turtle figures with the pizza disc launchers. 😅
ooh crap I always wanted one of those as a kid
@@LGRBlerbs i found one in a thrift shop and gave to my goddaughter who loved it.
Or the Pizza Launcher vehicle they had, used batteries and launched the pizza discs really far.
One of my favorite toys. I like where your head's at.
There was a time in my life when something like this would have been INCREDIBLY handy to have. I used to burn like crazy back when I actually had a reason to. Now it's pretty rare I burn anything.
700mb / 4.7GB is pretty tiny by todays standards ... but back in the day CD-R / DVD-R burners were the coolest of gadgets on the PC scene
@@SecretOfMonkeyIsland784 I was the first one in my high school to get a CD burner back in the day and let me tell you, everyone was jealous and constantly asking me up to burn them music CDs.
And going from backing up files on a 1.44 MB floppy to a 700 MB CD was a total game changer.
I stand by the position that ripping & burning are two of the coolest/funnest verbs associated with computers. Totally support continuing the practice if for no other reason than retro-sneakernet shenanigans.
Same here. I quit burning DVD's because movies are dirt cheap now on DVD (not the $25-$40 they used to be) and my ISP has more security lockdowns on the pipeline and they know when I torrented a movie. I have been downloading movies since 2005 with no problems then all of a sudden in 2021 they started cracking down and I started getting copyright notices in the mail.
To keep dust off of the discs, lets dispense them in a way that forces you to grab them in a way that puts fingerprints on the bottom.
Nothin gives you a quality burn like a disc that has light abrasion and finger oils on it before its first use!
Yeah strange choice to have it fall out the bottom instead of get pushed out a slot on the side.
I don't think you get it. You dispense it and hold it by the hole and the edge. Zero abrasion and no finger oils.
There is a cutout to let you grab it with a finger through the hole and one on the rim, I don't know why you wouldn't just take the lid off the spindle and leave it off though, the side you don't want dust on faces down anyways
I can see this as useful for smaller tech companies from the early oughts where they'd burn individual CDs of software for customers rather than have a TON of CDs with possibly outdated software versions to dispose of.
still better for the discs to stay on the towers they come in, though
So glad this video also answers the question of what happens to a patent once it finishes pending (it becomes pended). 😂
I guess it was denied by the patent office, so they could not write Patent Pending any more and certainly not Patented :)
I think the nice part of this is later in the years, a lot of cost reduction was done to eliminate the spindle, and cover and just had the blanks shrink-wrapped. (not that anyone who has blown through blanks for years wouldn't have spare spindles in a closet somewhere) So I can definitely see how late life usage this would be actually kinda helpful!
Now that'd be a solid use case.
I don't remember CD-Rs not coming in a spindle unless you were buying a five pack or something. Was this like super late in the reign of burning CDs?
Thats what I thought too. As someone who STILL buys blank cds/dvds alot of time they are just stacks wrapped in shrinkwrap now.
That actually does make sense.
@@adampope5107 They are on the shelf in 25-packs at a Wal-Mart near you...
Firstly, your eventual joy when you rapid-fired discs was a balm for my soul!
Also, I imagine the nominal reason for this was to keep dust out of the stack and avoid knocking it over since the lid stays in place when loaded on the dispenser.
Kind of reminds me of a device we had for the self-service kiosks when I worked in a photo lab, except what we had was an external burner with the dispenser mechanism bolted on top. In theory, if a customer wanted to burn a CD, the drive would eject, the dispenser would drop a disc into the drive tray, which would then close and start the burning process. When the burn was done, the device would pick up the disc, close the tray and then drop it into a receiving tray . In reality, the mechanism almost never worked, and it was just easier to manually hand the customer a disc and burn it using the kiosk's internal drive.
That was for a Kodak kiosk. I still have the whole external unit for a kiosk, big yellow external drive looking thing. I scrapped it like 15 years ago.
I too miss CompUSA, and their line of branded products. I remember buying more than a few of them! Now seeing it in action it is kinda neat. To load it easier, I might try turning the spindle of discs upside down in the lid, sitting the dispenser on top and then flip the whole thing before adding the locking ring.
I miss CompUSA too. Luckily I live where there’s a brick and mortar MicroCenter.
@@theinitiate110 We have a Micro Center about an hour north of where I live. I don't get to make it up often, but it's almost like stepping into the past. It's still very old-school -- but with (mostly) modern supplies.
Several stores down here had them, they would sell CD-Rs individually. The cashier would pop one out, put it in an envelope and off you went. Can't remember the price but I wanna say 50 cents or a dollar each. This was circa 2003ish.
It is absolutely oddly appealing. I've never seen them before, but I think I suddenly can't live without one. lol
I have been living without one of these all my life and now I'm starting to question how I've survived.
On a more serious note, another fun use that came to me would be to fill it up with a stack of shareware discs and various CD-ROMs in no particular order. You know the kind of discs that you somehow strangely have accumulated over the years, but you're not sure how exactly and that you've always been meaning to have a look at one day.
Well, just fill it up and pop it within reach and whenever you feel like it, take a disc from your personal CD-ROM lottery machine.
I just bought a random stack of Anime demo discs that used to come from magazines. That sounds like it would be fun to fill this up and play one randomly when bored. Maybe find some shareware disks to for variety. Great idea!
@@MezzoForteAural Just make sure all those anime demos are wholesome, or put this dispenser where the kids can't get at it.
I love when (even easy) manual tasks are accomplished by a button press.
Growing up and being a teenager in the early aughts with Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, and Bearshare.... CD burners were everything. The possibilities were endless.
Happy Birthday! I hope you enjoy your celebration and enjoy your holiday! Thank you for making such amazing and enjoyable videos
in the 2000s i remember companies like princo selling packs of 100 CDs without a plastic tray and cover. the whole pack would be all shrink wrapped and then where would you put your blank cds? you'd just keep the thing ripped open on the corner of your desk and risk spilling all the cds on the ground. that's where this becomes useful.
Except it doesn’t come with the clear plastic chute, you’d still have the same problem.
@@Crow.Author You're meant to use the dust lid from the CD spindle as the top to this dispenser. Why they didn't just include all that with it I don't know.
Happy Belated Birthday! Watching you find a reason to love this gadget was endlessly amusing!
This is not only the best thing ever, this is the best video ever! thanks for the content clint! love ittt
Thank heavens for this. I can't tell you how tired I am of having to lift a blank disc off of a spindle. This will save me second -s- out of every year!
Happy Birthday!! Enjoy the Holidays!! Thanks for the great videos. \m/
Happy birthday and happy holidays! Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
I'd load it from the spindle upside down and place a nice soft cool crab mousepad underneath to gently catch the disc. Awesome!
This device seems dumb but it saved my marriage. I was required to burn CDs and I was always super stressed about lifting the lid and pulling one single cd out... Over and over and over. Until one day I snapped. Our marriage counselor recommended the device and now I'm celebrating 20 years with my wife!
I used something very similar to this in the 90s at Boeing when we'd have to go in on a weekend and upgrade 500 pcs. IT Services would burn 500 copies of some patch (!!) and we'd each be given a preloaded CD dispenser. We'd walk down the rows of the desks pop a CD, insert it, start the upgrade program, and then move on to the next desk. Four or five guys could upgrade 500 PCS in about an hour start to finish. Then they finally moved to network upgrades and we never had to do that again. That brought back some good memories. Good times, lol.
I have 3 of them for a long long time and I find them very useful. They stand on a shelf and taking a disc is so handy. One tip put them in upsite down, at that point the first to come out will never get dusty on the write side even after years.
I have one coming up on the 24th. Have Merry Christmas, Happy New year, and Happy Birthday!
I don't even have an optic drive and I want one of these dispensers. I went through many writable CDs in my youth. I still have almost all of them in a box of CDs in the closet, with the CD contents scribbled in Sharpie on the front. I remember one holiday we visited my aunt and uncle, and he had a massive music collection of 700+ CDs, so I spent the entire trip ripping as many of the CDs as I could. I had an MP3 player at this point that I used for daily commutes to school, but it was like 1GB or less so it wasn't practical to store entire albums on, so the CD collection still played a huge role.
damn. i would have loved to have something like that back in the day. didn't even know it existed...
My dad had not one but three of these in my parent's computer office room from 2003-present. One for CDs, one for DVDs, and one other for either dual layer or some other specialty disc. We went on a lot of family trips with our digital camera and my grandpas and grandmas would always want copies of our photos so we would burn discs as copies for them plus extras for us as archive copies filed away in big storage bins. Very handy and definitely they were well used in their time!
14 year old me would have thought that's the best thing since windows XP.
Happy birthday and Merry Christmas LGR. 🎂🎁🎄🎉
Yay got a bit sad that when we clicked on the video it was taken down so glad you put it back up , awesome 😊
Clint being amazed by something so pointless but cool is the best part of my day.
LOL I love it. especially the non-compusa branded one that says "Desirable" on the top! Happy Birthday!
Pointless, yet somehow kinda neat. Thanks for showing, Clint. And happy birthday.
Happy Belated Birthday Clint! Keep up with these videos so that we can experience these oddwares without paying for one! 😆
If you think we’re here for a disk dispenser, that’s incorrect, we’re here because YOU’RE talking about a disk dispenser. Thank you for years of awesome content!
Happy Birthday, Clint!
Saw this go uplast night, then dissappear. Glad to actually get to watch it this morning.
If I had seen this back when CDs were more of a thing, I would have 100% bought and used it
An artefact of the past!
Happy birthday and Happy holidays :)
A short little blerb and video is good Clint honestly you are amazing
Happy birthday buddy! 🎉
Haha. I didn’t have 1. I had TWO! 😊
Still got them in a box in my attic 😂
I don't know how I ever survived without this. I will run to my local CompUSA store immediately to get one.
Haha, how funny, the Pez dispenser of optical discs!
I have never seen or heard of one of these and now I need one.
Yes, I bought three of these back on '06 under the original EZ-disc name, used them pretty regularly for storing blank DVDs and CDs till around 2013 or so when I stopped needing to copy audio CDs for work and DVD movies for home use. These were great when you are just bulk copying an audio CD/DVD and popping them into sleeves after burning, saves time picking up the spindle twisting off the top and putting it back down, without the discs getting dusty or dropped/spilled on the floor.
And yes it's so simple a mech that they still work and are storing my remaining blank discs to this day for the once a year or so that I need one.
Happy early birthday, Clint!
Happy Birthday! Mine is on Sunday, have a great one!
Have one of these since early to mid 2000s, and I love it.
Was a tech in a PC repair shop and we used these a lot. Since we burned 5-10 discs per day, or more, made it easy to grab discs while doing other things.
I got three of these without CompUSA branding from Microcenter many years ago. I still use one at work since I routinely burn security footage for accidents, case files, and law enforcement. Unfortunately, it’s the only one I have left since being at work saved it from one of my sister’s bipolar “I’m bored enough to toss out all my brother’s junk” episodes where she mistook them for empty cake boxes that she didn’t approve of me keeping. The reason each dispenser had an empty cake box attached was that I would often buy a new stack of blank discs that didn’t come with one… or came in one that was incompatible with the disc dispenser. The dispensers obviously required a cake box and it was actually getting difficult or impossible to buy the discs you needed in a compatible one, so you had to save the old one at least until you got more discs to know whether or not you needed it.
I originally bought them almost two decades ago and it was almost a decade ago that my sister threw them out. I found more on Amazon but I never ordered them. Those weren’t CompUSA-branded either.
We had something similar in our server room back in the late 90’s. The build quality was a little nicer that the one you showed, you would push down on a button to release the disk rather than pull back the lever. We had it mounted above the cd rom burner and so if you opened the cd rom drawer the pushed to get a disc it would land 9/10 times onto the drawer. Very cool. We also had a set of marks to show when the office jr should reorder more disks.
This gave me a terrible idea for rapid internal storage ejection, whereby you use a vaguely similar mechanism to disconnect & pop out hard or solid state drives to take them on the run or something(???). Wouldn't _really_ serve a major practical purpose, but would be kinda cool.
in the late 00's i had the task of burning a bunch of "demo reel" DVD-Rs for a VFX company. this seems like a cheap but effective tool to simplify the workflow a little bit if you are burning a dozen+ discs one after another.
Happy birthday Clint!
I love it. You have to unload them first, then load it so you can unload them one at a time. This is peak performance here.
Probably would make more sense to turn the container of CDs upside down, remove the spindle, attach the dispenser to the plastic cover and then turn the whole thing right side up. Still a weird device, but seems an easier way to load it.
Happy Birthmas Clint!
Clint, the crazier, the better!!! Yes! Keep this stuff up...
Haha, this is pretty funny! I've never seen one before, and it does seem pretty pointless. Happy New Year!
I miss my local CompUSA. Also Computer Warehouse. They were wonderous as a kid to me. Almost like Christmas just to visit them.
I agree, very oddly appealing. Happy holidays everyone! 🤘
Slightly more useful than the disc rewinder. Just a note; the box does say to dispense discs one at a time, so if they get scratched up, that's on you for getting happy with the dispenser switch.
Happy birthday dude.
This is just awesome. The Comp USA branding is like icing on the cake!
Hey Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas to you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks!
Hope you have/had a great birthday!
This is an example of solving a problem you didn't know you had.
The exact same device can be found under many different names all over the internet in on-line stores.
Amazon seller has it listed under the name "EZ Disc".
I did a search for 'cd disc dispenser' and all kinds of items appeared... and they all looked like the same thing!
BTW.... I have 4 of these on my PC desk. Have had them for many years.... they still work fine!
That smacks of the VCR rewinders and other semi-gag like trinkets you could buy for your nerd friend. "Oh you burn lots of CD-Rs, so they'd love this doo-dad!"
Happy early birthday Clint!
Happy birthday LGR!
I would legit use something like this even now. I imagine if you were to take it apart you could design and 3d print a better one that maybe doesn't potentially damage your blank media before you even use it.
I say put a solenoid in there, and hook it up to a Raspberry PI. Then write some software that can trigger the solenoid, and an app for your phone so you can eject a disc from there. How is that for a New Years project?
I've never seen one of them before, but now I MUST HAVE ONE!
This is so awesome and something I never would have bought even if I saw it, which I didn't. My OCD wouldn't have allowed it. I even threw away discs that seemed to have dust on them and thumbing it before burning is out of the question 😊
Happy birthday Clint! Be safe yeeyee
Happy birthday mate, mine was on the 20th.
Mine as well, happy shared birthday!
I would, so much, buy this back in the day.
Happy (late) birthday Clint!
I don't understand why I love this and feel like I need it.
For the late 90's to early 2000's computer setup it's a nice little for fun thing to have :)It's nice to have something more then just the computer for an interesting setup.
God bless Comp USA, I miss them dearly.
I got one of these, branded 'Memorex" (i also have a Memorex VCR lol), and it's great if you got a spindle and you use them a fair bit (i burn a lot of ESR discs for PS2 on an 8,1 iMac i have in the hobby room for workstation stuff (runs Mojave, thanks DosDude1), and the dispenser is under the desk ready for action with a 100 disc stack of Sony DVD-Rs loaded. had for years and still serves it's purpose, i think i got mine at a yard sale over ten years ago.
I have one. I found it on the cheap at a local thrift (sadly, not around anymore) years ago, and since I keep blanks on a shelf out in the hall, I can keep some of them in this thing and not have to walk out and get them. Of course, I rarely use them anymore but when I DO....:)
I remember seeing one of these at a SIGGRAPH years ago, when they would have teaching panels and needed to hand out pre-burnt discs with unique graphic assets or beta programs , but couldn't just install them on the desktops in the room (the good old days of small hard drive discs and no cloud). It still only saved a second I'm sure for the people handing out the disc, but I guess that time either added up to make it worth it or prevented strain as it was thousands of people a day being handed a disc.
Still got 2 of these with different colour plastic, one for CDRs and the other for DVDRs. They came in useful when bulk discs stopped being supplied in cake boxes and were just shrink wrapped.
This device solves a problem no one was having. Brilliant.
If I were still burning discs I would totally want one of these.
Happy birthday Clint 😊
Happy belated birthday!
Happy Birthday!
I had something similar in the early 1990s, but for 3.5 Inch diskettes. And all my new ones were in there. It was in the Amiga era, the good old days 🙂
I still have the blue one myself from back in the day, it currently sits in the corner behind my modem and next to my retro W98 rig which has a Plextor burner.
Not using it much either but you only need one hand to flip the lever and presto a Blank CDR
I was envisioning this being a powered/motorized device that could potentially be modded to shoot the discs out at a much higher speed, kinda like that one weapon in UT99 whose name eludes me at the moment.
Fun little thing regardless.
Clint, what we really need is a Christmas sandwich over on LGR Food.
If you still burn CDs or DVDs from time to time you should be on the lookout for a cheap old Primera Disc Publisher or similar duplicator, I picked a working one up for $100 and it's so incredibly satisfying to watch a robot arm pick up a blank disc from a spindle, feed it into the recorder, then move it to a labeling inkjet after the disc is recorded and spitting the finished, printed disc out the front. Best part is that it all works through Remote Desktop so I can control my little bootleg factory from another room entirely!