CD-R Nostalgia

2022-01-06

feeling some nostalgia for CD-Rs now in the start of 2022 💿
i only have one computer left that even has a cd drive.
kinda sad how it's died off, and how the media gets more expensive
but really now, they were kinda annoying,
mostly i just used them to install various linuxes
and it's just single-use, burn the iso file for ubuntu 12.04 or something and install it,
and then put the cd in your cd pile in your bookshelf and forget about it,
never to install ubuntu 12.04 ever again, because why would you need to?
hope you remembered to write the name of the distro onto the disc itself.

they would fail occasionally. i burned maybe 15 or 20 different linux discs over the years,
and occasionally the iso file itself was corrupted, and occasionally the burning would fail;
sometimes the burning program itself would inform me
during the post-burn verification step
that oops, it didn't work, enjoy your useless circle of plastic.
cut it in half and throw it in the non-recyclables.
try not to get the foil inside everywhere,
it's very light and the slightest static electricity will hold on to it.

a bit sus as a backup medium, but they were really cheap.
but i always preferred the cd-rw,
which eventually got harder and harder to find,
because i was afraid of commitment.
i liked my half-a-terabyte usb 2.0 hard drive anyway,
it was slow to copy to and it needed an extra power supply
but it always had the option of deleting embarrassing files –
but as far as i know, i still have all of those files,
inside a folder called "old machine"
inside a folder called "stuff",
inside a folder called "old_windows",
inside a folder called "heap".
never deleted anything.

every year or so i'd buy a linux magazine,
that's its name, "linux magazine",
and they'd have a dvd of some less-common distro within them,
and i'd boot it in live distro mode and never install it,
because what do i really use a computer for?
games and youtube, and linux didn't have steam back then,
and youtube needed flash, and it didn't work on linux.

and before that, when broadband was only getting common,
we'd get yearly CDs full of goodies inside the MikroBitti magazine,
mainly just shareware games and trial versions of programs,
probably including winrar too, funny how that's the one thing that didn't change.
i remember this one game in particular, santa claus in trouble,
and it was actually really good, played it year after year;
it was one of the few "modern" games that could run well on the family computer.
it was also insanely hard in the later levels, endless frustration,
and after some hours of grinding the looping christmas music was annoying.
the world was quite scary actually,
not because of the monsters,
but because of the endless void below:
how did santa claus get into this mess? where is this horror-scape without a floor?
i also remember a duck-shooting game, like that nes game duck hunt,
but on the pc and controlled with a mouse, point your shotgun around and shoot the ducks,
but the strange thing was that it was johnny walker branded.
as in johnny walker, the horrible blended fire and smoke whisky,
with the logo of the dude walking with his top hat and cane and the cursive signature.
i had no idea who or what johnny walker was, but it sounded cool and sophisticated.
from one of those CDs
(we didn't even buy mikrobitti, a distant relative gave us a bunch of the discs)
i also installed this top-down combat game called meteor,
there are a thousand games called that but this ran on windows xp and probably 9x,
it was really fun, and it had a level-editor too,
so i could explore all the content without having to actually beat it.