Him and Steve Wozniak were two golden carp in a tank full of sharks, though I believe Jeffrey Epstein would have given Gates a good character reference.
@@raulrrojas Thank you for this sordid news. This past is as bad as when I missed employment opportunities to enable me to learn to use DOS, Microsoft Windows 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, plus Wordstar, Supercalc, dbase, earlier versions of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator, and other programs created in the earlier years. Guess what? I came out much better by using Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and Microsoft Office XP Professional on a new microcomputer I bought myself, than I would working in another men's or women's workplace. I can do better all by myself. Also, thank you for typing to me.
I'll never forget the first time I used a CD-ROM drive in the early 90s, it was amazing. Just could not believe how much was stored on a CD-ROM, despite being read-only. Those of you who didn't live through that era really missed something special.
I also remember our frustration, after launching a magazine CD-ROM with loads of PC games, when McAfee spotted a virus in one file and prompted us to clear it. Well...how exactly? The CD-ROM disk wasn't writable! Now what??? :-)
And now it is up to you to recognize what about our current technology is just as "emergent", and profit big on pointing us unwards. Because I assure you, whatever feels "modern" about the present day, will feel just as dated as what we see here, and even outrageously simple in 20 years. We will think: "Man, did we really do it like this", and "Man, had I only thought about this OBVIOUS next step, I would be the one with the billions". Go nuts, dream about all the possibilities. They are there. And some will notice them, while most will not. I guess one of the big things will be how we interface with technology, as we move away from our clumsy "thumbs on screens".
@mike h You are completely right in terms of THIS domain of computers; The Von Neumann architecture. While clock speeds has increased, and components has shrunk, the basic idea has stayed the same for 70 years... But I assure you a computer in 500 years won't look anything like what we have today. The Von Neuman method is way too linear and waaay too power hungry. And to get things from processor to RAM, and back takes a relatively long time... Big things has yet to come. And especially AI will change stuff (IS changing), because the linearity of current hardware goes so much against what Neural networks really need.
CD rom was the computer input of my childhood. I never knew life with out it. I can remember my parent's buying the encyclopedia on CD Rom in 1989 when l was four. It helped me with my school book reports. Encyclopedia on CD ROM was a 90's childs Wikipedia.
@@johngrave5554 A friend of mine had Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM. That was pretty cool to see, especially since they had videos for some of the topics. The first time I understood Special relativity.
Same here in Brazil back then. CDs started to become popular about 7 years later, not really popular because it was very expensive having a player or a CD-ROM Drive at the time. It only started to become mainstream in 1994, 95...
It wasn't very much different in the US consumer market. While the hardware existed in the mid 80s, very few owned one until the 1990s rolled in. It was such a niche driven market that there wasn't much desire for ownership after learning of what they cost. Even the folks with cash to burn were more interested in getting a hard drive to install programs to avoid the slow access time of a floppy and the constant swapping.
@@rafroessolarpowered81 It wasn't until the Playstation that a lot of people here begun using audio CDs. A Playstation console cost less than a CD player as Sony sold them at below production cost to ensure that as many people would buy them as possible, since they got 30% of every game sold they didn't care about the loss on the console. This cause other CD manufacturers to start bringing the cost of their regular players down and started a price war. They did the exact same thing with the Playstation 2 and DVDs and attempted it a third time with Playstation 3 and blurays, but by then people were more interested in streaming.
@@fattomandeibu That's incorrect. My aunt had a stereo system with built in cd player in 1989, and my first cd player was the sega cd. And we were no where near rich.
Gary would have been amazed at flash drives and the modern ssd's and to see that optical media is becoming slowly obsolete, Gary is such a Inventor & tech nerd of the day. I came from the day's of the XT & 286 and up hence why i say Gary would be amazed
Gary and other tech intellectuals understood Moore's law very well and mathematically would comprehend the bits and bytes of modern day technology. What they would have potential amazement over is what we use the storage for these days and how society evolved over computer driven technology in ways that were really not predictable in any accurate way.
Back when developers respected your storage space. sucks now when you install a 50gb game and half that is cutscenes which you spam click skip anyway. and 5% that is in high def music you mute anyway while youtube is playing in the background and 20% that is 4k textures when you have a 1080p screen. I remmber old big box games givng you the option to skip installing stuff like the music if you didnt want it.
Wel here we are in 2020 and optical storage is still not dead, I would say it still has ap decades to go, maybe not giant mass marcket, but nothing beats 4k bd
I removed my optical storage drive and replaced it with an SSD caddy the other day after realising I hadn’t used one in about 4 years. However I hammered them for the best part of 20 years. They were an amazing invention and one day we will reminisce about ITb Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drives in the same way…or you young folk will.
You can probably include me in "young folk" since I was born in '94, but it's funny, I cannot have a computer without an optical drive. The first computer I built in 2014 with money from a summer job had an optical drive, a CD/DVD burner. My current and second computer built in 2021 also has an optical drive. I still burn CDs for my stereo, or burn drivers to discs for use in other/older computers I own. As a kid playing with the Windows 98 PC my father had CDs were a huge part of the experience, the discs were so satisfying to handle and place in the drive. It feel like the most "computer-y" thing to handle discs and insert or remove them from my computer lol, kinda like handling floppies, or USB drives lol, and its probably a similar sensation fans of vinyl experience when putting an album on their turntable.
A baud is one symbol per second, which is one bit per second, or a zero or a one per second. Binary computer code is made of ones and zeros, for instance the letter "k" in binary ascii computer code is "100 1011". It contains eight binary symbols, which are called bits, each letter in ascii binary code can be represented with a string of eight ones and zeros, "L" in ascii is: "100 1100". A lower case L or "l" is: "110 1100". A "$" symbol in ascii is: "010 0100". Because ascii encoding was one of the first widely used computer codes and because each letter or symbol in the code was eight bits long, they began referring to each segment of 8 bits as a single byte. So remember, the eight bit code for "K" is: "100 1011" that is one byte. A baud is 1 bit per second. So 1200 baud is 1200 bits per second or 150 letters a second transferred from one computer to another. Or something like 0.143 kilobytes a second or 0.000143 megabytes per second. To put that into perspective, a modern cable Internet connection usually has a speed of 20.0 megabytes per second. It would take 6 hours to download a 2 minute .mp3 on a 1200 baud connection.
Woooow Really? 150 letters per secon? OMG just imagine how long ill take to download an entire GB of information. So this thing was before the 28mb/s modems (Sorry for my bad English) This is so amazing. How they could do so much with these limited systems and resources.
@@Abr3200 Even today a lot of information is being transferred as text. Text-based websites like Wikipedia would still be perfectly usable with a 1200 baud modem; it transfers text a LOT faster than you can read it. Same for Whatsapp or any other messaging service. E-mail too. You really don't need high speed connections as much as you think.
My dad used to program on the Laser Disc when he worked with NASA Ames... 16k dollars to update a cateloge? I never realized how lucky my parents were using CD's in the early 1990's casually.
Interesting to see how optical media was the future in 1986 while today it is already deprecated, at least in computing. All this while magnetic media is still very much alive in computing, although obviously we are seeing the beginning of it's demise due to flash memory creeping up on it.
I don't think flash will be replacing tape any time soon. Tape is CHEAP for archival, and still getting cheaper, and requires less effort to preserve it for its effective life, to say nothing of how easy it is to get stuff from old tape to new tape. It's going to be a long time, if ever, before flash replaces tape for archival.
@@cube2fox Well, tape has never really been an HDD format. I can't imagine the load times. o_O But even that, does flash last as long as even HDD, let alone tape? Durability is the key. I don't think flash replaces HDD until it achieves that level of robustness.
@@jesuszamora6949 I don't think he was suggesting that tapes are hard disks. They are obviously not. But hard disks are magnetic like tape. I think you are right in that flash does not have quite as high a durability (in terms of number of write operations) as hard disks, but nonetheless the durability seems to be so high now that it isn't a concern any longer, at least for private customers. Speaking about tape, I think its main advantage is its low price per bit, which makes it well suited for archival purposes. (And even hard disks are much cheaper than flash memory.) Also, if the DVD hadn't been invented, tapes would have been also well suited as video format. Similar to VHS, but digital. In fact there were attempts to introduce such a medium. Its capacity was comparable to Blu-ray discs and as such way ahead of the then common DVDs. Maybe such high capacity was simply not needed back then because Full HD TVs weren't available.
@@cube2fox Not sure if I'd go so far as to say flash is durable enough that the average consumer won't care, as it's only been in a price range the consumer can swallow without being super tech-minded recently, and is mostly seen in tandem with an HDD (running the OS and games while data is kept on the HDD). Perhaps by the time it gets as cheap as HDD (which it will, eventually), the durability will also catch up and we'll see them used exclusively. Used to be winchester drives were incredibly sensitive, and look where we are now. And yeah, I saw a Techmoan video about D-Theater. That kinda highlighted tape's only real issue, and why it's consigned to archival nowadays. Loading. Holy hell, that D-Theater player sounded like an IBM 5150 for how loud it was! They were spinning the reels like crazy, I can't imagine how weird it'd be trying to use them in a PC for normal use!
When new tech came out back then, it was like wow. Now it's like oh cool. Can you imagine teens today having to use dialup for the internet? Glad I was a teen and saw the birth of computers ect. Tech has come a long was within the last 40\50yrs. I remember boasting about my new upgrade to a 486 DX4-100 with 4mb ram.
is the chap 5:00 in from Wales..? 512MB free ! of course , CD audio had only just come out! fantastic exciting times. I was so glad that bug info in fiche was replaced by CD-ROM
@@jesuszamora6949 not even close, they're all unseen mediums with the only difference being speeds, not even sizes (which are actually downgraded compared to traditional platters)
2:38 “not online” Wait. I’m enormously confused. Why would he be even uttering the words “not online” if the internet was “in utero” (not even infancy yet) in 1985, there definitely wasn’t any e-commerce… right? WTF??
Nope. Online connectivity has been in existence for a long time. Consumer level access was common in the 1980s through service providers such as Compuserve, Genie, and Qlink (the predecessor to AOL). These were nationwide services so it operated under the same idea where you connected distantly with (relative) ease as most used a GUI or a pseudo-GUI text menu prompt. Online shopping was in fact available during this time, albeit of course not a fraction of what it became when the commercialism of the Internet unfolded in the mid 90s. These providers relied not on what we know as the internet, but a different standard known as packet switched networks such as Tymnet, or Telenet. You can crudely think of them as private loop based networks across the nation. There were forums where people commented/debated just as we call it as "social media posts" today. Again, not anywhere of the same scale since it was very niche but it did exist!
I love these episodes from the 80s. It was just a bunch of computer wonks sitting around and talking about the technology, no dumbing it down or anything. Later on in the mid 90s Stewart tries to cover too much in one episode and to dumb it down for a general audience, just hopping around from thing to thing with no depth. Love the in-depth look at optical storage of the day here.
It's amazing to see this because back then CD-RW where great to store huge amounts of data. Nowadays we use DVD-RW which has 4.37GB compared to a CD-RW which could only hold 650-700MB at the time.
The CD-Rom technology had a pretty long period of dominance and lasted a lot longer than you would think for an 80s tech. CD-RW didn't get introduced until 1997.
Think that had more to do with the cost of the devices and publishing companies still having to find a use for all that storage space that the average user would find usefull or entertaining. The killer apps that sold CD-ROM drives were after all games like the 7th Guest and later Myst. And of course fully voiced adventure games like Day of the Tentacle also helped. Basically CD-Rom didn't take of until the average PC's performance level became capable of multimedia playback (Audio&Video)
Took more evolution and refinement over other complementary hardware items. Else, CDROM titles just importing text database stuff, though having some niche in business/education, was pretty boring and stale for the consumer market. Consumers wanted to be dazzled to make the purchase. Sounds cards, for instance, to playback digital samples, took a bit of time to get into the affordably priced market for PCs. Motion video also required some serious horsepower that just was not possible under the original XT or 286 processor. Even the 386 was too slow and only until the 486 came out with its fast integer processor could we get decent stuff done to what we now call multimedia.
It's interesting how the concept of the CD-RW was in the works since the inception of the CD-ROM. I don't think that I've seen smaller LaserDiscs than the ones that were the size of regular 33 1/3 RPM records before. Were they only ever used for the early computers?
The big invention by Philips in the late 60s / early 70s but the computer industry (US) was actually very conservatively late with embracing it (at least lagging behind by 10 years). In the Netherlands with Philips HQ, LaserDisc was already available in 1972 for the high-end consumer... Read-only application at the time for even primitive computing seems very obvious to me..., storage and distribution of big data, e.g. libraries: books, engineering data, law books, technical fiches for complex products, complex manuals, building engineering, compliance validation, etc, etc...
I think my first awareness of cd roms were when the Amiga CD32 was introduced. A few years later I bought a PC with a cd rom drive, with OS/2 preinstalled. But I don’t think I owned a cd rom until I purchased Windows 95.
@5:53 "It becomes to a point were a single disc can approach the human brain" Lol, they really underestimated the storage capacity and complexity of the human brain in the 80s. 35 years later and we still aren't close.
In the late 90s and early 2000s I used to save so much sht into CDs using my cd "burner" used to back up everything! As hard drives were so prone to crashing!
Is this for sure a 1985 episode? One of the news bits in Random Access is about Apple announcing the Mac has finally beaten the Apple II in sales, for fiscal year Q1 1986. Also there's that NCC 86 thing at the end.
I'm going to start developing a fast CD-ROM Read-Write so people can write their own CD-ROMs at home and do it fast. Can you imagine how that will change the market?
Incorrect. This episode was created in late 1985. This particular broadcast was in 1986 -- notice that the date at the front was put there by the broadcasting station, and not by CC.
They were mostly pretty expensive stuff so average consumer wasn't the target market. There was quite a bit of things offered to industry segments like parts catalogs, legal resources, and lots of material related to marketing segments. This was all before online access made these obsolete.
That encyclopedia is much more powerful than Google Search in 2024. It can actually do exact full text search. Something you can't even dream about in modern Google "search".
And today I have an external (dual USB) BluRay rewriter drive (50GB) sitting at arm's length. Cost me less than $100 a couple of years ago. Not to mention USB thumb drives at up to 500GB, or USB NVMe at upwards of several TB of flash storage...
Who would have thought that in less than ten years later the CD-ROM ended up storing the Windows 95 operating system. Most of the IBM Clones during the intervening years between this program and the debut of Windows 95 the various competing operating systems trimmed down to just two created by Microsoft, those being MS-DOS and Windows operating systems which are the standard for most non-Apple computers to this very day.
While floppies may be dead here in 2024, magnetic media (HDD) is still the king of quick-access storage. The segment about transferring the contents of an optical disc (1200 baud for 48 days) made me laugh. I just had an update to an application that would have taken 90 days at 56k modem speeds. I made this observation to my wife and only got a blank stare in response.
punishedexistence CD-ROM in 1985 was like a technology from NASA. while even in early 90's, many of us in Europe still used 3.5 floppy disks for data storing. the CD-ROM became a real thing in our PC's on 1994/1995. earlier we only had a stereo music players and these were the only things that used CD discs (for audio only) in our houses.
and the reason is simple - back on 80's a very few software was released on CD-ROMs, the optical drives were freaking expensive (costed more than entire computer) and only IBM PC's was able to use it (yes, CD-ROM was only IBM compatible for long time, it became for other platforms like Macintosh, Amiga, Atari etc. in 1992/1993)
The best of tech was just unattainable unless you had deep pockets though. Much of its use was also very limited, so you had this hot piece of technology that was maybe 1/3 of your disposable income for the year and yet it had such little impact in your daily life.
First aired 1985, this was a later re broadcast tape the first broadcast tape was probably corrupted in some manner sadly magnetic tape doesn’t hold up well over time. Hence why we are missing so many episodes of classic Dr Who.
En 1985 computadoras personales como la IBM PS/2 tenian un capacidad de almacenamiento de disco duro de 10 MB. Ese mismo año salian al mercado los CD-ROM con 650 mb de capacidad de almacenamiento, pero no es hasta los primeros años de la decada de los 1990s que los CD-ROM se convierten en el estandard de la industria de los PCs y los discos duros pasan a almacenar Gbytes de memoria
It's more or less dead aside from the entertainment enthusiasts. There simply are a lot of titles produced that are not available in online distribution format. It's actually only a very tiny amount of motion picture produced that is available online. Your average person, however, is only interested in watching top rated stuff which is all online.
Bubble eventually won. Just a different type of solid state non-volatile memory, i.e. flash, which obviously took off and killed floppies, CDs, DVDs, and now hard drives. His argument about software was spot on, and Bill Gates knew it too. Software is expensive and fundamentally a one-time development cost, and it's a waste of money making 3 versions for the sake of supporting 3 OSes, so whoever gains a majority market share will become unstoppable.
4:30 "The enormous capacity of CD-ROMs, about 250 Megabytes per side, ..." I'm pretty sure they always had just one side and never less 650 MB per side?!
This episode claims 250MB per side, 550MB, about 600MB, and 1GB on a 12” disc, which is a huge demotion in density compared to CD. This is a little before the time when I got into CD-ROM. I wonder if all these systems complied with any of the colored books, or if there were multiple readers out there with vastly different proprietary formats.
The first standard cdroms were mode 1 with 2,048 bytes per block giving 580mb capacity. They then switched to mode 2 with 2,336 bytes per block upping the capacity to 662mb. It was more of a formatting change and didnt change where the data physically stopped on the disc. Later on 700mb and 800mb data discs were introduced which actually reached closer to the edge of the disc as tolerances improved. The 1gb sega dreamcast gdroms were a formatting change to a 800mb disc.
Yeah, he go that one totally wrong. He said it would not "fit comfortably" in the environment, and would be too expensive. Fast forward 10 years and operating systems, software, video games & movies would be distributed on optical disk, and CD-ROM drives for the PC were 10x cheaper.
@@DavePoo2 I really try to keep a cool head when he is speaking throughout this series. I realize his contributions to computer history but he certainly was a pompous doof alot of the time when asked about vision and foresight.
When you can have a 200gb microSD memory card, I see optical disappearing, and I know Apple had eliminated the cd-rom drive from their small computers.
Most mobile devices have dropped them. with no moving parts due to the lack of hard drive, DVD drive, and cooling fans battery life goes way up. I bought a laptop about two years ago with no optical drive and the one I bought a few months ago had no moving partfs at all. I've had the battery last almost 8 hours of solid usage, laptops just a few years ago barely got 2-3 hours lol
Optical media has the advantage of still being much cheaper. Sony's archival disc archives cost around $57 per TB, while a spindle of regular BD-R discs can hit as low as $16 per TB. That's much cheaper than magnetic hard discs, let alone flash storage (which costs roughly 15x as much), and that's just buying a spindle as a consumer. Bulk orders of optical discs can get much cheaper. It's even rumoured that Amazon based their "Glacier" archival storage service on a massive array of BDXL bluray disc libraries, taking advantage of large economies of scale.
@08:50 Lol, really? Presenting a layout in book form? They clearly had no idea what they were doing. The power of later encyclopedia's like encarta was that you had powerfull search features at your disposal. The idea of going to a specific "book" and find someone or something there by it's name in that "book" is not how those would be used. Search, Index, Cross links, Categorization those were the powerful features of an encyclopedia on CD-ROM.
Technology changes much faster than culture. There was a while there when people scoffed at the idea of CD-based encyclopedias because part of the “joy” of owning a set was rummaging through them and finding things you weren’t even looking for. There was hesitation that the random encounter with an article would be lost. Hence the book metaphor. The demonstrator even says something to this effect - that you can thumb through them like a traditional set. Anyway, it was new, they were blazing a trail, responding to feedback. Etc etc. it got more optimized as the usage patterns developed.
Back when pcs were a piece of commerial industrial equipment for big businesses and there was no consumer, prosumer or enthusiast pc market cause it was too expensive
Well, you didn't see a lot of this type of stuff until the IBM clones hit. This was the absolute cutting edge. The early adopter is richer, and the economies of scale make it more affordable to the masses.
At this time most of the consumer market execs were by-products of the mainframe era computing of the 60s/70s where they acquired most of their knowledge, influence, and wealth.
Gary kildall was a genius. Allways focused and pointing in the right direction. Admire.
Raul Rojas Yep, then Gates and Co, (you know the guy who will save us from Covid 19), by stealing from and killing him.
Him and Steve Wozniak were two golden carp in a tank full of sharks, though I believe Jeffrey Epstein would have given Gates a good character reference.
I hope Gary Kildall is not dead.
@@captainkeyboard1007 he is. Sadly, He died several years ago.
@@raulrrojas Thank you for this sordid news. This past is as bad as when I missed employment opportunities to enable me to learn to use DOS, Microsoft Windows 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, plus Wordstar, Supercalc, dbase, earlier versions of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator, and other programs created in the earlier years. Guess what? I came out much better by using Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and Microsoft Office XP Professional on a new microcomputer I bought myself, than I would working in another men's or women's workplace. I can do better all by myself. Also, thank you for typing to me.
I'll never forget the first time I used a CD-ROM drive in the early 90s, it was amazing. Just could not believe how much was stored on a CD-ROM, despite being read-only. Those of you who didn't live through that era really missed something special.
kirk1968, I lived through it and needing memory cards was kinda stupid. 🙄 Revolutionary though.
y0shiness kirk1968 is talking about CD-ROM technology used in the PC world. Not just for the Sony Playstation, that was a game console.
Using Microsoft's Encarta in the mid 1990s was amazing at the time, even on a 2x speed CD drive.
I also remember our frustration, after launching a magazine CD-ROM with loads of PC games, when McAfee spotted a virus in one file and prompted us to clear it.
Well...how exactly? The CD-ROM disk wasn't writable!
Now what??? :-)
I agree, it was awesome at the time! I should have appreciated it more!
Technology is always much more fascinating when it's in the emerging stage, and you can dream about all the possibilities to come.
And now it is up to you to recognize what about our current technology is just as "emergent", and profit big on pointing us unwards. Because I assure you, whatever feels "modern" about the present day, will feel just as dated as what we see here, and even outrageously simple in 20 years. We will think: "Man, did we really do it like this", and "Man, had I only thought about this OBVIOUS next step, I would be the one with the billions".
Go nuts, dream about all the possibilities. They are there. And some will notice them, while most will not. I guess one of the big things will be how we interface with technology, as we move away from our clumsy "thumbs on screens".
@mike h You are completely right in terms of THIS domain of computers; The Von Neumann architecture. While clock speeds has increased, and components has shrunk, the basic idea has stayed the same for 70 years...
But I assure you a computer in 500 years won't look anything like what we have today. The Von Neuman method is way too linear and waaay too power hungry. And to get things from processor to RAM, and back takes a relatively long time...
Big things has yet to come. And especially AI will change stuff (IS changing), because the linearity of current hardware goes so much against what Neural networks really need.
That would be especially when it works right. Otherwise, computer technology would be a hair-pulling experience.
CD rom was the computer input of my childhood. I never knew life with out it. I can remember my parent's buying the encyclopedia on CD Rom in 1989 when l was four. It helped me with my school book reports. Encyclopedia on CD ROM was a 90's childs Wikipedia.
Encarta encyclopedia was my jam. In the early 2000
@@johngrave5554 A friend of mine had Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM. That was pretty cool to see, especially since they had videos for some of the topics. The first time I understood Special relativity.
WIkipedia has a lot of fake info, encyclopedia don't.
I love how at a time where almost no one in my home country even knew what an audio CD was, these people were already using CD-ROMs.
Same here in Brazil back then. CDs started to become popular about 7 years later, not really popular because it was very expensive having a player or a CD-ROM Drive at the time. It only started to become mainstream in 1994, 95...
It wasn't very much different in the US consumer market. While the hardware existed in the mid 80s, very few owned one until the 1990s rolled in. It was such a niche driven market that there wasn't much desire for ownership after learning of what they cost. Even the folks with cash to burn were more interested in getting a hard drive to install programs to avoid the slow access time of a floppy and the constant swapping.
@@rafroessolarpowered81 It wasn't until the Playstation that a lot of people here begun using audio CDs.
A Playstation console cost less than a CD player as Sony sold them at below production cost to ensure that as many people would buy them as possible, since they got 30% of every game sold they didn't care about the loss on the console.
This cause other CD manufacturers to start bringing the cost of their regular players down and started a price war. They did the exact same thing with the Playstation 2 and DVDs and attempted it a third time with Playstation 3 and blurays, but by then people were more interested in streaming.
@@fattomandeibu That's incorrect. My aunt had a stereo system with built in cd player in 1989, and my first cd player was the sega cd. And we were no where near rich.
While CD-ROMs were new in '85, I don't think they were really used much until like 10 years later. Floppy disks were still dominant for a long time.
The intro in this always tricks me. The high pitch beep at 0:41 has the exact same pitch as the fire alarm in my house.
Gary would have been amazed at flash drives and the modern ssd's and to see that optical media is becoming slowly obsolete, Gary is such a Inventor & tech nerd of the day. I came from the day's of the XT & 286 and up hence why i say Gary would be amazed
Gary and other tech intellectuals understood Moore's law very well and mathematically would comprehend the bits and bytes of modern day technology. What they would have potential amazement over is what we use the storage for these days and how society evolved over computer driven technology in ways that were really not predictable in any accurate way.
I was using CD and then DVD ROMs up until 2007. I still have them, including the PS2 ones.
Reminds me of those old games that asked if they should install all stuff on disk or load some from CD
Back when developers respected your storage space. sucks now when you install a 50gb game and half that is cutscenes which you spam click skip anyway. and 5% that is in high def music you mute anyway while youtube is playing in the background and 20% that is 4k textures when you have a 1080p screen. I remmber old big box games givng you the option to skip installing stuff like the music if you didnt want it.
One of these days I’m gonna save up my money and get me one of them microcomputers.
Thank you Japan for all the great inventions!
Wel here we are in 2020 and optical storage is still not dead, I would say it still has ap decades to go, maybe not giant mass marcket, but nothing beats 4k bd
Laser...disc???
Okay there SpaceMan, I'll stick to my tapes, thank you.
Gary thought about the paperless society, we are currently 99% on that stage.
I removed my optical storage drive and replaced it with an SSD caddy the other day after realising I hadn’t used one in about 4 years. However I hammered them for the best part of 20 years. They were an amazing invention and one day we will reminisce about ITb Thunderbolt 3 NVMe drives in the same way…or you young folk will.
You can probably include me in "young folk" since I was born in '94, but it's funny, I cannot have a computer without an optical drive. The first computer I built in 2014 with money from a summer job had an optical drive, a CD/DVD burner. My current and second computer built in 2021 also has an optical drive. I still burn CDs for my stereo, or burn drivers to discs for use in other/older computers I own. As a kid playing with the Windows 98 PC my father had CDs were a huge part of the experience, the discs were so satisfying to handle and place in the drive. It feel like the most "computer-y" thing to handle discs and insert or remove them from my computer lol, kinda like handling floppies, or USB drives lol, and its probably a similar sensation fans of vinyl experience when putting an album on their turntable.
I still watch DVDs but I have been slowly transferring all media to portable hard drives.
I actually laughed out loud at "...You would have to transmit, nonstop, at "1200 baud" for 46 days."
What its a baud?@_@
A baud is one symbol per second, which is one bit per second, or a zero or a one per second. Binary computer code is made of ones and zeros, for instance the letter "k" in binary ascii computer code is "100 1011". It contains eight binary symbols, which are called bits, each letter in ascii binary code can be represented with a string of eight ones and zeros, "L" in ascii is: "100 1100". A lower case L or "l" is: "110 1100". A "$" symbol in ascii is: "010 0100". Because ascii encoding was one of the first widely used computer codes and because each letter or symbol in the code was eight bits long, they began referring to each segment of 8 bits as a single byte. So remember, the eight bit code for "K" is: "100 1011" that is one byte. A baud is 1 bit per second. So 1200 baud is 1200 bits per second or 150 letters a second transferred from one computer to another. Or something like 0.143 kilobytes a second or 0.000143 megabytes per second. To put that into perspective, a modern cable Internet connection usually has a speed of 20.0 megabytes per second. It would take 6 hours to download a 2 minute .mp3 on a 1200 baud connection.
Woooow Really? 150 letters per secon? OMG just imagine how long ill take to download an entire GB of information. So this thing was before the 28mb/s modems (Sorry for my bad English) This is so amazing. How they could do so much with these limited systems and resources.
And that is why I was laughing out loud, it's incredible how far we've gotten in 30 years in computer and data transfer sciences.
@@Abr3200 Even today a lot of information is being transferred as text. Text-based websites like Wikipedia would still be perfectly usable with a 1200 baud modem; it transfers text a LOT faster than you can read it. Same for Whatsapp or any other messaging service. E-mail too. You really don't need high speed connections as much as you think.
I'm still waiting for the 1TB optical disc that's been a year away for a decade.
26:58 Really, Paul? Then what does "dsp sz i nw" mean? Disposition sizzles in northwest?
i have 8TB of storage at speeds that would blow all these guys minds.....its wild to think this was the cutting edge of tech.
Funny how enterprise magnetic tape outlived optical storage
My dad used to program on the Laser Disc when he worked with NASA Ames... 16k dollars to update a cateloge? I never realized how lucky my parents were using CD's in the early 1990's casually.
Interesting to see how optical media was the future in 1986 while today it is already deprecated, at least in computing. All this while magnetic media is still very much alive in computing, although obviously we are seeing the beginning of it's demise due to flash memory creeping up on it.
I don't think flash will be replacing tape any time soon. Tape is CHEAP for archival, and still getting cheaper, and requires less effort to preserve it for its effective life, to say nothing of how easy it is to get stuff from old tape to new tape. It's going to be a long time, if ever, before flash replaces tape for archival.
@@jesuszamora6949 I'm pretty sure he was talking about hard disks.
@@cube2fox Well, tape has never really been an HDD format. I can't imagine the load times. o_O But even that, does flash last as long as even HDD, let alone tape? Durability is the key. I don't think flash replaces HDD until it achieves that level of robustness.
@@jesuszamora6949 I don't think he was suggesting that tapes are hard disks. They are obviously not. But hard disks are magnetic like tape. I think you are right in that flash does not have quite as high a durability (in terms of number of write operations) as hard disks, but nonetheless the durability seems to be so high now that it isn't a concern any longer, at least for private customers.
Speaking about tape, I think its main advantage is its low price per bit, which makes it well suited for archival purposes. (And even hard disks are much cheaper than flash memory.) Also, if the DVD hadn't been invented, tapes would have been also well suited as video format. Similar to VHS, but digital. In fact there were attempts to introduce such a medium. Its capacity was comparable to Blu-ray discs and as such way ahead of the then common DVDs. Maybe such high capacity was simply not needed back then because Full HD TVs weren't available.
@@cube2fox Not sure if I'd go so far as to say flash is durable enough that the average consumer won't care, as it's only been in a price range the consumer can swallow without being super tech-minded recently, and is mostly seen in tandem with an HDD (running the OS and games while data is kept on the HDD). Perhaps by the time it gets as cheap as HDD (which it will, eventually), the durability will also catch up and we'll see them used exclusively. Used to be winchester drives were incredibly sensitive, and look where we are now.
And yeah, I saw a Techmoan video about D-Theater. That kinda highlighted tape's only real issue, and why it's consigned to archival nowadays. Loading. Holy hell, that D-Theater player sounded like an IBM 5150 for how loud it was! They were spinning the reels like crazy, I can't imagine how weird it'd be trying to use them in a PC for normal use!
When new tech came out back then, it was like wow. Now it's like oh cool. Can you imagine teens today having to use dialup for the internet? Glad I was a teen and saw the birth of computers ect.
Tech has come a long was within the last 40\50yrs.
I remember boasting about my new upgrade to a 486 DX4-100 with 4mb ram.
The Air Force loved the CD ROM. My parents tell me that was the data transfer medium of choice when they were in the military.
is the chap 5:00 in from Wales..?
512MB free ! of course , CD audio had only just come out! fantastic exciting times. I was so glad that bug info in fiche was replaced by CD-ROM
First CD rom player I owned was in 1993 for a 386 clone. I purchased Rebel Assault along with, at the time the graphics were mind blowing.
Watching these with modern technology is just so cool, too bad that I'm too young when these were truly amazing new technology.
You're seeing it happen with Flash and SSD.
@@jesuszamora6949 not even close, they're all unseen mediums with the only difference being speeds, not even sizes (which are actually downgraded compared to traditional platters)
"Write once read mostly." Little Freudian slip there, eh, Gary?
didn't get it
This is the first time seeing that giant CD and I’m over 50 😂
2:38 “not online”
Wait. I’m enormously confused. Why would he be even uttering the words “not online” if the internet was “in utero” (not even infancy yet) in 1985, there definitely wasn’t any e-commerce… right? WTF??
Nope. Online connectivity has been in existence for a long time. Consumer level access was common in the 1980s through service providers such as Compuserve, Genie, and Qlink (the predecessor to AOL). These were nationwide services so it operated under the same idea where you connected distantly with (relative) ease as most used a GUI or a pseudo-GUI text menu prompt. Online shopping was in fact available during this time, albeit of course not a fraction of what it became when the commercialism of the Internet unfolded in the mid 90s. These providers relied not on what we know as the internet, but a different standard known as packet switched networks such as Tymnet, or Telenet. You can crudely think of them as private loop based networks across the nation. There were forums where people commented/debated just as we call it as "social media posts" today. Again, not anywhere of the same scale since it was very niche but it did exist!
I love these episodes from the 80s. It was just a bunch of computer wonks sitting around and talking about the technology, no dumbing it down or anything. Later on in the mid 90s Stewart tries to cover too much in one episode and to dumb it down for a general audience, just hopping around from thing to thing with no depth. Love the in-depth look at optical storage of the day here.
13:02 These are the eyes of someone who searched one too many databases. One who's seen one too many compact discs.
One who has one too many dead hookers in his trunk and just now remembered it.
It's amazing to see this because back then CD-RW where great to store huge amounts of data. Nowadays we use DVD-RW which has 4.37GB compared to a CD-RW which could only hold 650-700MB at the time.
BD-RE is a thing too, and that's a healthy 100GB
The CD-Rom technology had a pretty long period of dominance and lasted a lot longer than you would think for an 80s tech.
CD-RW didn't get introduced until 1997.
Ironically, the benefits of optical storage would not begin to be realized by the general John Q. Public until the mid 90s.
Think that had more to do with the cost of the devices and publishing companies still having to find a use for all that storage space that the average user would find usefull or entertaining. The killer apps that sold CD-ROM drives were after all games like the 7th Guest and later Myst. And of course fully voiced adventure games like Day of the Tentacle also helped.
Basically CD-Rom didn't take of until the average PC's performance level became capable of multimedia playback (Audio&Video)
Took more evolution and refinement over other complementary hardware items. Else, CDROM titles just importing text database stuff, though having some niche in business/education, was pretty boring and stale for the consumer market. Consumers wanted to be dazzled to make the purchase. Sounds cards, for instance, to playback digital samples, took a bit of time to get into the affordably priced market for PCs. Motion video also required some serious horsepower that just was not possible under the original XT or 286 processor. Even the 386 was too slow and only until the 486 came out with its fast integer processor could we get decent stuff done to what we now call multimedia.
Because computers were too primitive until mid 90s
It's interesting how the concept of the CD-RW was in the works since the inception of the CD-ROM. I don't think that I've seen smaller LaserDiscs than the ones that were the size of regular 33 1/3 RPM records before. Were they only ever used for the early computers?
There was a format/rebranding of laser disc called "CD Video" that used smaller, 20cm, disc's. Techmoan has a video on it.
@@mrsvcd Do you mean video cd? A bit different technology, video cd is more similar to dvd than laserdisc.
The big invention by Philips in the late 60s / early 70s but the computer industry (US) was actually very conservatively late with embracing it (at least lagging behind by 10 years). In the Netherlands with Philips HQ, LaserDisc was already available in 1972 for the high-end consumer... Read-only application at the time for even primitive computing seems very obvious to me..., storage and distribution of big data, e.g. libraries: books, engineering data, law books, technical fiches for complex products, complex manuals, building engineering, compliance validation, etc, etc...
No. Computers were too primitive until mid 90s to get advantage of this technology
Philips is is garbage, anything being made that was any good was made in JAPAN
@@ens8502 Computers had been using them since the mid 80's. The drives were just too expensive for most.
See the eyeballs on the caption? I am sure he was watching a 386 running Crysis
I think my first awareness of cd roms were when the Amiga CD32 was introduced. A few years later I bought a PC with a cd rom drive, with OS/2 preinstalled. But I don’t think I owned a cd rom until I purchased Windows 95.
@5:53 "It becomes to a point were a single disc can approach the human brain"
Lol, they really underestimated the storage capacity and complexity of the human brain in the 80s. 35 years later and we still aren't close.
We were more... Optimistic in the 80s.
In the late 90s and early 2000s I used to save so much sht into CDs using my cd "burner" used to back up everything! As hard drives were so prone to crashing!
Is this for sure a 1985 episode? One of the news bits in Random Access is about Apple announcing the Mac has finally beaten the Apple II in sales, for fiscal year Q1 1986. Also there's that NCC 86 thing at the end.
Episode aired 5/12/86
Nope 2024 episode
Stuart we miss you ::(
Stuart's still around! You can follow him on Twitter @cheifet, he tweets about technology related things quite often.
Gary Kildall is gone though...
if Gary Kindall was still around (any now overly angry at M$ taking over the world), he would love Blu-rays etc.
+Juggynaut He would be Apple's biggest fan boy since they've started to topple the ms empire lol
He was interviewed by Bryan Lunduke recently.
5:07 is that the anti mullet?
It's a precursor in the process of evolution into the true anti-mullet, the "Karen".
I'm going to start developing a fast CD-ROM Read-Write so people can write their own CD-ROMs at home and do it fast. Can you imagine how that will change the market?
CDs in that time had 550MB, then in 1992 they had 650MB and today, they have 700MB.
Wow what an improvement throughout time
This episode is from 1986, not 1985.
Incorrect. This episode was created in late 1985. This particular broadcast was in 1986 -- notice that the date at the front was put there by the broadcasting station, and not by CC.
@@AureliusR Incorrect. Look at 24:54
@@AureliusR Unfortunately you’re incorrect.
Did databases on CD's ever take off? What kinda databases would you get on CD? Anyone here ever have any experience with that?
I remember libraries often had magazine indexes available at public workstations.
They were mostly pretty expensive stuff so average consumer wasn't the target market. There was quite a bit of things offered to industry segments like parts catalogs, legal resources, and lots of material related to marketing segments. This was all before online access made these obsolete.
According to 24:54 this video is from 1986.
Yes, even in the videos intro it say 1986, the description is incorrect it seems...
These episodes remind me that I'm older than I thought.
That encyclopedia is much more powerful than Google Search in 2024. It can actually do exact full text search. Something you can't even dream about in modern Google "search".
10:25 - The world's first recorded Wiki Walk in history folks!
And today I have an external (dual USB) BluRay rewriter drive (50GB) sitting at arm's length. Cost me less than $100 a couple of years ago. Not to mention USB thumb drives at up to 500GB, or USB NVMe at upwards of several TB of flash storage...
Ahhh solid state, the kids just don’t get how easy it is now.
and 40 years later and optical storage has been supplanted by NVRAM.
The size of DEC's CD-ROM drive. 😱 16:00
LaserDisk was available since 1978 I'm curious why there was no laser disk data drives even before CD was introduced?
Look at Techmoan s channel. He has done in depth researches into the reason why.
Spent a lot of time browsing the encyclopedia britannica on CD ROM lol, i don't think we had the internet at that stage.
Wait is the demo guy using a wireless mouse in 1985?
In that time cd got more memory than the harddrive
Who would have thought that in less than ten years later the CD-ROM ended up storing the Windows 95 operating system. Most of the IBM Clones during the intervening years between this program and the debut of Windows 95 the various competing operating systems trimmed down to just two created by Microsoft, those being MS-DOS and Windows operating systems which are the standard for most non-Apple computers to this very day.
Brilliant people.
Reminds me of the NeXT computer, which chose optical over an HD.
While floppies may be dead here in 2024, magnetic media (HDD) is still the king of quick-access storage. The segment about transferring the contents of an optical disc (1200 baud for 48 days) made me laugh. I just had an update to an application that would have taken 90 days at 56k modem speeds. I made this observation to my wife and only got a blank stare in response.
CD rom blew my mind when it came out now its gone
@17:23 lol and then your mom picks up the phone and you have to start all over.
Does anyone know what GUI the IBM PC is using in that video? An MS-DOS GUI that was only used by Grolier?
Yeah it's just running PC DOS, but Grollier itself has a GUI.
imagine telling these guys back then that they could have multiple terabytes on a small nvme storage device.
For 1985, this ain't half bad technology, really.
punishedexistence CD-ROM in 1985 was like a technology from NASA. while even in early 90's, many of us in Europe still used 3.5 floppy disks for data storing. the CD-ROM became a real thing in our PC's on 1994/1995. earlier we only had a stereo music players and these were the only things that used CD discs (for audio only) in our houses.
and the reason is simple - back on 80's a very few software was released on CD-ROMs, the optical drives were freaking expensive (costed more than entire computer) and only IBM PC's was able to use it (yes, CD-ROM was only IBM compatible for long time, it became for other platforms like Macintosh, Amiga, Atari etc. in 1992/1993)
The video is actually from 1986. Look at 24:54
The best of tech was just unattainable unless you had deep pockets though. Much of its use was also very limited, so you had this hot piece of technology that was maybe 1/3 of your disposable income for the year and yet it had such little impact in your daily life.
Optical Storage Devices!? That will never take off
That'll never take off is the same damn comment people keep making on these videos. Stop it bro.
@@FaridShahidinejad Calm down.
@@charlesmak534 it's been 10 months and I'm still pissed, bro. Damn. Whyyyyyy do people keep making the damn same comment.
Seeing how no new laptops have it you might be right
*THE ENORMOUS 250MB CAPACITY*
250 TB you said???
Description says 1985 but video intro says 1986?
First aired 1985, this was a later re broadcast tape the first broadcast tape was probably corrupted in some manner sadly magnetic tape doesn’t hold up well over time. Hence why we are missing so many episodes of classic Dr Who.
@@Finallybianca Definitely makes sense.
Revenge of the hard drives!
En 1985 computadoras personales como la IBM PS/2 tenian un capacidad de almacenamiento de disco duro de 10 MB. Ese mismo año salian al mercado los CD-ROM con 650 mb de capacidad de almacenamiento, pero no es hasta los primeros años de la decada de los 1990s que los CD-ROM se convierten en el estandard de la industria de los PCs y los discos duros pasan a almacenar Gbytes de memoria
I was 4 months old at that time
3:33 Top of the hour.
4:42 What’s that accent?
Probably Welsh
Funny how optical media is dying today due to the Internet.
Optical was dying 15 years ago. DVD and BLURAY were the only reason why it's kinda sorta still alive today.
@@FusionC6 even usb memory sticks killed cd roms xD
It already died
It's more or less dead aside from the entertainment enthusiasts. There simply are a lot of titles produced that are not available in online distribution format. It's actually only a very tiny amount of motion picture produced that is available online. Your average person, however, is only interested in watching top rated stuff which is all online.
7:50 come back in about 10 years.....
OMG Father Guido Sarducci was a computer geek! @16:01
Lol at the 'maintenence' on the disc
The date in the title is a bit of.
And 38 years later optical storage devices are obsolete.
Sorry George, you were wrong! Unlike bubble memory, CD's DID eventually take off and become the standard.
Bubble eventually won. Just a different type of solid state non-volatile memory, i.e. flash, which obviously took off and killed floppies, CDs, DVDs, and now hard drives. His argument about software was spot on, and Bill Gates knew it too. Software is expensive and fundamentally a one-time development cost, and it's a waste of money making 3 versions for the sake of supporting 3 OSes, so whoever gains a majority market share will become unstoppable.
This episode is from 1986
You mean to tell me I can carry around an entire encyclopedia on an optical disc just 4.7 inch wide?
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
4:30 "The enormous capacity of CD-ROMs, about 250 Megabytes per side, ..."
I'm pretty sure they always had just one side and never less 650 MB per side?!
just one side, but it was 512 mb at the beginning
@@Moskito844 Do you have a source for that? Both my memory and Wikipedia says 650 MiB.
This episode claims 250MB per side, 550MB, about 600MB, and 1GB on a 12” disc, which is a huge demotion in density compared to CD. This is a little before the time when I got into CD-ROM. I wonder if all these systems complied with any of the colored books, or if there were multiple readers out there with vastly different proprietary formats.
The first standard cdroms were mode 1 with 2,048 bytes per block giving 580mb capacity. They then switched to mode 2 with 2,336 bytes per block upping the capacity to 662mb. It was more of a formatting change and didnt change where the data physically stopped on the disc. Later on 700mb and 800mb data discs were introduced which actually reached closer to the edge of the disc as tolerances improved. The 1gb sega dreamcast gdroms were a formatting change to a 800mb disc.
@@700gsteak Hm... And were does the number 650 come from?
i have seen one with 800mb but they are very expensive
beautiful !!
George Morrow literally never gets it right re the future of computing.
Yeah, he go that one totally wrong. He said it would not "fit comfortably" in the environment, and would be too expensive. Fast forward 10 years and operating systems, software, video games & movies would be distributed on optical disk, and CD-ROM drives for the PC were 10x cheaper.
@@DavePoo2 I really try to keep a cool head when he is speaking throughout this series. I realize his contributions to computer history but he certainly was a pompous doof alot of the time when asked about vision and foresight.
And in 2021 time traveller from 1985 asks where's your fav music albums or your videos and i reply in the Clouds HAHAHA its true
When you can have a 200gb microSD memory card, I see optical disappearing, and I know Apple had eliminated the cd-rom drive from their small computers.
Most mobile devices have dropped them. with no moving parts due to the lack of hard drive, DVD drive, and cooling fans battery life goes way up. I bought a laptop about two years ago with no optical drive and the one I bought a few months ago had no moving partfs at all. I've had the battery last almost 8 hours of solid usage, laptops just a few years ago barely got 2-3 hours lol
Optical media has the advantage of still being much cheaper. Sony's archival disc archives cost around $57 per TB, while a spindle of regular BD-R discs can hit as low as $16 per TB. That's much cheaper than magnetic hard discs, let alone flash storage (which costs roughly 15x as much), and that's just buying a spindle as a consumer. Bulk orders of optical discs can get much cheaper.
It's even rumoured that Amazon based their "Glacier" archival storage service on a massive array of BDXL bluray disc libraries, taking advantage of large economies of scale.
A lot of data centers still use tape drives for storage.
microsd has terrible write cycles. its not replacing optical.
Man this post shows its age. Now it's 1tb sd storage for not much over 50 bucks.
Boy oh boy,
8:57 Amyl Nitrite.
That thumbnail tho.
@08:50
Lol, really? Presenting a layout in book form? They clearly had no idea what they were doing. The power of later encyclopedia's like encarta was that you had powerfull search features at your disposal. The idea of going to a specific "book" and find someone or something there by it's name in that "book" is not how those would be used. Search, Index, Cross links, Categorization those were the powerful features of an encyclopedia on CD-ROM.
Technology changes much faster than culture. There was a while there when people scoffed at the idea of CD-based encyclopedias because part of the “joy” of owning a set was rummaging through them and finding things you weren’t even looking for. There was hesitation that the random encounter with an article would be lost.
Hence the book metaphor. The demonstrator even says something to this effect - that you can thumb through them like a traditional set.
Anyway, it was new, they were blazing a trail, responding to feedback. Etc etc. it got more optimized as the usage patterns developed.
Oh imagine if you could go back now and buy shedloads of Microsoft and Apple shares.
It's interesting that not a single guest throughout the run of the show appears to be under 40.
Back when pcs were a piece of commerial industrial equipment for big businesses and there was no consumer, prosumer or enthusiast pc market cause it was too expensive
Well, you didn't see a lot of this type of stuff until the IBM clones hit. This was the absolute cutting edge. The early adopter is richer, and the economies of scale make it more affordable to the masses.
At this time most of the consumer market execs were by-products of the mainframe era computing of the 60s/70s where they acquired most of their knowledge, influence, and wealth.
@5:42, yeah, maybe your brain.
George Morrow is right - this stuff will never take off - now get off my lawn.