This CompUSA Disc Dispenser Exists
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ย. 2024
- 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.
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
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.
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 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
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It is absolutely oddly appealing. I've never seen them before, but I think I suddenly can't live without one. lol
I love when (even easy) manual tasks are accomplished by a button press.
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.
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.
Growing up and being a teenager in the early aughts with Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, and Bearshare.... CD burners were everything. The possibilities were endless.
I'd load it from the spindle upside down and place a nice soft cool crab mousepad underneath to gently catch the disc. Awesome!
If I had seen this back when CDs were more of a thing, I would have 100% bought and used it
14 year old me would have thought that's the best thing since windows XP.
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 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 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...
Clint being amazed by something so pointless but cool is the best part of my day.
Haha. I didn’t have 1. I had TWO! 😊
Still got them in a box in my attic 😂
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
Good use for this is to make it a games shuffle deck for a day long marathon of gaming. Whatever comes out, is played!
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!
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.
I don't know how I ever survived without this. I will run to my local CompUSA store immediately to get one.
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!
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!
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?
Imagine painting the cover as an alien tank or some sort of vat. I can see these easily being scooped up by people and creativly transformed into neat little decorations for their desk that also serves the handy purpose of dispensing optical media!
This is an example of solving a problem you didn't know you had.
Happy Belated Birthday! Watching you find a reason to love this gadget was endlessly amusing!
Pointless, yet somehow kinda neat. Thanks for showing, Clint. And happy birthday.
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.
I miss my local CompUSA. Also Computer Warehouse. They were wonderous as a kid to me. Almost like Christmas just to visit them.
This is not only the best thing ever, this is the best video ever! thanks for the content clint! love ittt
Worked at a media shop where we did small run (
This device solves a problem no one was having. Brilliant.
I still have two of these. The best part is that I can load them up and put them on a higher shelf. No need to take it down and take apart to get a cd. Just reach up and click one out. Obviously don't use them too much anymore, but they got plenty of use in their day.
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.
LOL I love it. especially the non-compusa branded one that says "Desirable" on the top! Happy Birthday!
Haha, how funny, the Pez dispenser of optical discs!
There was a time I would have to burn discs like mad from morning to night a couple times a week. This would have been incredibly nice to have back then.
Birthday right around now … Clint is actually a Christmas Clone confirmed.
This looks like the perfect thing for setting up in the early 2000s for burning Linux CDs/DVDs quickly, especially once lightscribe caught on. I dunno how useful it is today.
Saw this go uplast night, then dissappear. Glad to actually get to watch it this morning.
Back when i was burning multiple discs a day for myself and friends, this would have been a fun accessory haha. I had 2 dvdr drives hooked up as master/slave so on the fly copying was done. I eventually got to around 2000 burned discs that were finally dumped onto multi-TB hard drives a decade later. In the past 7 years i may have burned 2 or 3 discs for some reason.
Happy birthday and happy holidays! Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
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 🙂
Happy Belated Birthday Clint! Keep up with these videos so that we can experience these oddwares without paying for one! 😆
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!"
An artefact of the past!
I've used this exact dispenser for probably the last 15 years. Got 2 of them and have always kept them full of DVD-Rs and CD-Rs.
I have one coming up on the 24th. Have Merry Christmas, Happy New year, and Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday! I hope you enjoy your celebration and enjoy your holiday! Thank you for making such amazing and enjoyable videos
Have one of these since early to mid 2000s, and I love it.
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.
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.
A great product to scratch and put fingerprints on a brand new blank media just before burning somthing on it!
Brilliant.
Having one of these would have been an epic flex in the early days of CD burners.
Ha, I just threw out my two along with the CD and DVD blanks that have been sitting unused on a back shelf for many years now! For the $5 or so I paid for them, they were a worthy item, especially as you could store 150+ discs at any one time in one stack.
I could see this being super useful at a trade show in 2001. Have it sat out on your booth for people to come take a free CD with a demo or something.
If I were still burning discs I would totally want one of these.
It is now my headcanon that this is what launched the CDs in the arcade shooter game _Revolution X._
"Remember... music is the weapon!"
I've bought new ones recently from Amazon..
They are actually afair bit more useful than you'd initially imagine..
Easy to see how many you have left, etc.
This is the perfect to protect your unwritten discs just before you burn then throw into the sleeves on the sun-shield of your car, or floor or other chair, or wherever people were throwing their scuffed up burned discs back in the day.
Happy birthday and Merry Christmas LGR. 🎂🎁🎄🎉
I have never seen or heard of one of these and now I need one.
Never saw these before, I did work at CompUSA back in the 90's... I kept working there long after I got another job due to the 10% above cost on everything. Some things were like 90% profit.
Anyway, if I found these today for like $3-4 I might buy a few of them. I still have CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs, that DO use time to time, this would make them neater on the shelf in a cabinet.
EDIT: Looked on eBay, cheapest one is $21.15...
At first I was like "who would need something like that?"
Then I saw how the mechanism actually works and now I am like "why don't I have something like that?"
I don't understand why I love this and feel like I need it.
Haha.. when you said " why am I coming this?.. I said the say thing just before only to find I love it and I hate that I do!!.. I think I'll be seeing if can find one in the UK.. 🤣🤣
I would, so much, buy this back in the day.
Neat and somehow less pointless than a lot of computer stuff that came out in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember a similar thing you would tape to the top of the computer case so the discs would also be close to the drive, but can't recall if it had a dispenser function or if it was just a stack of discs
As someone who was born 1990 I remember CompUsa I remember the on city near me had a CompUsa store then it change to circuit City store. I always remember poping in CD Roms With CompUsa option . I personally always remember floppy disk holders for 3.5 disk. I was poor kid still using floppy disk back when everyone else was getting into burning CDs. It wasn't til I was in high school in 2006 when I started to get into burning cds even then I still used floppy disk more. My first windows operating system I ever used was Windows 3.11 and before that it was a Tandy with desk mate at home in school it was apple Lc ll that first learned how use computer. Then Iater on at home my had gotten a computer with windows 3.11 on it then had it upgraded to windows 95 . I remember my dad spending close to $500 dollars just in upgrade to that computer.
Teenaged me in the early 2000's burning approximately 30 mix CD's a day would have LOVED this thing.
Have you checked how many of those burned disks are still readable?
I used to burn backups of EVERYTHING, but recently realized that many of the disks have become corrupt in the last 15-20 years.
Sometimes I look at my binders FULL of burned movie backups and have a quick cry about how much TIME & MONEY I wasted buying/burning DVD backups of movies that are now all available to instantly stream, and in a higher quality...
@@StreetPreacherr I had burnt discs from over 20 years ago that work without issues. Just checked recently. I think a lot of it is the quality of the CDs and how it was stored.
I have one of those, its great, and sometimes it shoots the disc past the stops and onto the floor. I found the easiest way to load it was to flip the cake box upside down, remove the spindle, put the dispenser on upside down, then flip the whole thing over.
I miss Comp USA too. Where I first got to use a "modern" mac on display (way out of my price range as a teenager). As of the product - probably good place to keep loose blank CD's that didn't come with a spindle but otherwise a dumb idea just dropping a fresh blank on the desk and possibly scratching it.
Clint, what we really need is a Christmas sandwich over on LGR Food.
I feel like teenage me would have immediately vilified this thing, imagining all my precious CD copies (which would surely never be obsolete) becoming scuffed and useless before they could even be burned.
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.
Dude... best relic of the 2000s ever
the fact that you have to supply your own lid from the the OG Spindle is so dumb! i love it!
Clint, the crazier, the better!!! Yes! Keep this stuff up...
I bought SO many disks on spindles, and after a while of moving them around (after doing lots of burning), you'd have to find the covers with 3 tabs vs 4 tabs, to fit back on the spindle.
We had one for every type of disk at the college campus store. The attendant would take your money, pop one out, hand it to you in a paper sleeve.
This is the kind of thing a parent or grandparent would get their techie kid as a nick-knack gift. It’s better than underwear I guess, but I can’t help but think if you had a spot for this on your desk then you have a spot for a bog-standard spindle of disks straight from the store. Still, I’d probably have used it if I got one for free.
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 do an occasional eBay search for Egghead software. I have so many great childhood memories of going there