this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] tenchiken@anarchist.nexus 97 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn't actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.

This is part of why you could burn "faster", although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.

I am very, very old.

[–] nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world 38 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"Floppy disks" were 8 inches a side in my youth and went in the minicomputer

Then along came Newfangled desktop PCs with their 5.25" floppies

Tom Bombadil remembers first acorn and first rain drop

[–] DivineDev@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago

I used those big floppy disks with some ancient hardware for running physics experiments during university in like 2015-ish, and I'm sure that exact floppy is still in use today. It's not even a small and underfunded university or anything.

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[–] curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

As the owner of a CD burner so old there was no speed to note, and later upgraded to a 4x burner....

I'm also quite old it seems.

Edited to add: I bought it at a computer show. The kind that you showed up to in person and paid like $5 to get into. I also bought a used laser 128.

[–] mateofeo85@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Nerd alert!

[–] GreyCat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

I am very, very old

Good job !
And thanks for the explanation.

[–] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago

Godamn that's cool

[–] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago

Godamn that's cool

[–] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago

Godamn that's cool.

[–] Xatolos@reddthat.com 25 points 1 week ago

Me explaining what "Insert Disk 2 of 5" means.

[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 21 points 1 week ago

I had to explain what a CD was to my kids the other day because I saw a CD-ROM mirror and decided to get one. We didn't even cover what "burning" one was.

[–] sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I downloaded a 1GB update on my phone today and it took a couple minutes. I spaced out remembering how fucking advanced it felt getting a x2 CD burner.

[–] villainy@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Then you try to do anything else with that PC while it's writing at 300 KBps and... buffer underrun. So many coasters.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I remember when some company started advertising "BURN-proof" CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened "buffer underrun" to "BURN", and because, you know, "burning" was the entire point of a CD-R drive.

It worked though. Buffer underruns weren't a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.

[–] Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The last CD-drive I had burned at 52x. I still remember how it sounded like a small jet engine spooling up when the burn started. Amazing how I always got bit perfect burns and how the discs didn't explode while spinning like a car turbocharger.

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[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 16 points 1 week ago

What I miss most is burning .cue files with hidden tracks; you just don’t get the same high from streaming services.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

postapocalypse looking kinda cozy

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

Strong Ivan Bilibin vibes (but apparently it's by an another Russian artist, Ernest Lissner).

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

CDRWIN creating bad discs if you used a pirated key.

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[–] zebidiah@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

...and it was called NERO because it burnt ROM

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 8 points 1 week ago

"CloneCD uses a logo of a sheep because at the time it was relevant, the biggest news in cloning research was Dolly the sheep."

[–] marsza@lemmy.cafe 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm going to tell (and show) my kids that's what "burning a CD" was

[–] marsza@lemmy.cafe 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Especially the smell, lol!

[–] marsza@lemmy.cafe 7 points 1 week ago

I went to a LAN party way back in the 90s, and there was one kid who had a burner. It was back when they could easily fail to burn, so he had a stack of failed burns for us to nuke all night.

[–] LuaPurpa@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago
[–] rozodru@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I had a program that came with special CD Labels for the printer where you could make your own cool CD label covers. that was fun.

Or going into a Dreamcast IRC channel to download games and burn them to disk. I think I only ever actually bought like 2 Dreamcast games, Shenmue and Seaman, the rest were just burned to CD-Rs.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was buying blank DVD's with printable surfaces, I had an epson inkjet with a tray that would print directly on the disk.

I would get a shipment of 4 DVD's from netflix, rip all 4, shrink them down below 4.7G, burn them, print a label on them and put them in a binder. and mail them back out for the next set of 4. The output looked shockingly good. I made it through a spindle or so before i moved on to tversity and stopped dealing with physical media.

[–] Slovene@feddit.nl 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It was so awesome when I bought a LightScribe dvd burner and could put various decorations on the dvd along with the content label. The novelty wore off quickly though.

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[–] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Wait we could do this? On playstation you were supposed to change something no?

[–] Redkey@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The PlayStation 1 had a copy protection system that measured physical properties of the disc which couldn't be replicated by normal CD writers. There were a few ways to get around this, but to be able to put a burned CD into your console and boot directly from it into the game (as usual) required the installation of a fairly complex mod chip. A lot of people alternatively used the "swap trick", which is how I used to play my imported original games.

The DreamCast's copy protection was heavily reliant on using dual-layer GD-ROM discs rather than regular CDs, even though they look the same to the naked eye. There were other checks in place as well, but simply using GD-ROMs was pretty effective in and of itself.

Unfortunately, Sega also added support for a thing called "MIL-CD" to the DreamCast. MIL-CD was intended to allow regular music CDs to include interactive multimedia components when played on the console. However, MIL-CD was supported for otherwise completely standard CDs, including burned CDs, and had no copy protection, because Sega wanted to make it as easy as possible for other companies to make MIL-CDs, so the format could spread and hopefully become popular. Someone found a way to "break out" of the MIL-CD system and take over the console to run arbitrary code like a regular, officially released game, and that was the end of DreamCast's copy protection. People couldn't just copy an original game disc 1:1 and have it work; some work had to be done on the game to put it on a burned CD and still have it run (sometimes quite a lot of work, actually), but no console modification was needed. Anyone with a DreamCast relased before Sega patched this issue (which seems to be most of them) can simply burn a CD and play it on their console, provided they can get a cracked copy of the game.

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[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Still the best no frills digital audio medium.

[–] zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Even over the mini disc? Blasphemy!

[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago
[–] Redkey@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

I loved my MDs and Hi-MDs, but they had so many frills. All the frills. That was part of why I loved them!

[–] perviouslyiner@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

This is like Technology Connections having to explain what an MP3 CD is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIR23emsWY

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nah, I'd end up explaining why floppy discs weren't floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They were floppy though?

At least 8 inch, and 5.25 inch. 3.5 only on the inside (unless enough force is applied xD).

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[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Meh, burning CDs... ever had to worry whether you'd parked your hard drive's heads before moving it, child..?

(To be fair, neither did I, probably; my earliest hard drive was already IDE, I believe, and those seem to have already had autopark, but the old lore was that you parked your hard drives before moving them, or the heads would scratch the surface, so park them we did.)

[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

Yes, also you parked it before shutting down the system every time. Once the hard drive was powered down, the heads would just crash into the platters. While not instantly fatal, it wasn't good for the drive. So, you'd park the drive before flipping the power switch.

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ever have a hard drive with the head stepper motor visible outside?

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[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 6 points 1 week ago

mkisofs . | cdrecord - ?

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

...and for a while it was fairly normal to refer to writing bootable USB sticks as "burning" as well.

Now I don't say that anymore because I don't want to sound like a boomer, or - worse - I don't want people to take me at my word or think I'm just plain mad.

I always somehow thought the distinction of "burning" a USB thumb drive was adding an MBR or setting something that ordinary file writes don't do.

[–] Vupware@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

“What’s a seedy?”

[–] midori_matcha@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

"We first had to venture miles deep into the woods to find a local Circuit City, which bountifully bore free trial AOL CDs like fruit. We then grabbed an armful, despite the protests of the clerk, and hastily returned to camp. We then had to build a fire by hand, with kindling and wood, and we donned our robes. As the fire grew, we meditated and chanted around the fire, as we mentally mounted the Serious Sam bootleg install files. It took weeks to and a several acres of wood to chant the correct order of ones and zeroes, so we had to work in teams and take shifts. When it was my turn, I took a CD and stuck it through a metal stick stuck into the fire. I spun the CD with my bare hands, blistered and swollen by fiery praying, and lowered it into the fire to burn the ones, and raised it slightly for the zeroes. Any error found by the final validation step would result in premature cremation by the group. There were not many of us left by the time we had the LAN party. A room full of Pentium 4 PCs made the room feel as hot as a furnace, but the pizzas were cold that day, little ones. So cold..."

[–] Twakyr@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

@urheber@discuss.tchncs.de What happened to our youth?????

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