A CD with a handwritten label reading "Flash 8 installer + serial key"
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[–] 23 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Damn fancy pants, ain't nobody who can afford to use 700mb of potential storage for a 24mb installer and a crack with a virus. That's why 32mb USB sticks were invented.

We plebs had CD-ROMs from Bulgaria filled with software compressed to the max including both Flash and that Adobe program used to create flash content. And ripped versions of games where the audio and video was recompressed at a barely tolerable bitrate. Everything with cracks and viruses of course.

That's how I heard Oasis for the first time, "Champagne Supernova". Bundled as an MP3 with that dang music player that I can't remember the name of. You know the one that really whips the llamas ass? Yeah, that's the one.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    That's why 32mb USB sticks were invented.

    I think blank CD-Rs were cheaper than any size USB drive at that point...

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Absolutely, and the really fancy people even had CD-RW, an opti-magnetic system. But not all disk drives could read them, just like not all computers had an USB port!

    Wild times, let's not even get started on DVD-R and DVD+R - we could be here for hours.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    CD-RWs are not magneto-optical. MiniDiscs are though.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I knew about MD's, but I thought there was a metal alloy inside the CD-rw's heated up by laser, alligned/written with magnets?

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago

    It's a phase change alloy, when writing a high powered laser is used to melt the alloy, when it cools quickly it becomes opaque. When erasing, a lower powered laser heats up the disc and returns it to its transparent state. A reading laser isn't powerful enough to change the phases at all. So, you have the idea right... just no magnets involved.

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