As I worked on the device-drivers and devices that could play them (like the Tandy/Memorex VIS lol) I still have a bunch of unopened Medio CD-ROMS. One of these days I'll have to hook up the old chan3 coax to the TV and fire it all up...
The History of the CD-ROM Magazine (2016)
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: The History of the CD-ROM Magazine (2016)
#12"Unfortunately, the model as a whole couldn’t compete with the internet." I never think they were meant to. As young nerd, without a connection to The Internet, at a time where one would have you spend literally days online to download the amount of data a CD holds, these magazines were absolutely fantastic! Every month, when they came out, I was off to the store to get my two or three magazines, for about half the p…
I remember in the magazine section of Tower Records there was a section of paper magazines that came with a CD-ROM. You were mostly paying for the CD-ROM, but the paper magazine helped give you an idea of what was inside before you bought it.
I remember trying to play the content on the CD-ROMs was quite challenging. Different videos needed different video players to be installed. Or the latest version of a particular video player. Some of them needed more memory than my PC had. You had to have a relatively high end PC to play all the content, and I always had a low end PC.
But there was no other way to get that kind of content onto my PC. Download speeds were horrible. Connections were unreliable. Some of the download methods used required me to start over at the beginning when the download failed in the middle after 15 minutes. It was challenging.
Did I mention I had to walk to Tower Records in the snow, uphill both ways?
Re: The History of the CD-ROM Magazine (2016)
#13CD ROMs way too high tech, I recall the day when Cassette tapes first made it on to magazines no more typing lines of code from magazines. :-)
Re: The History of the CD-ROM Magazine (2016)
#14I'm reminded of the awesome youtube channel Pixelmusement with the "Shovelware Diggers" series that's been going on for a few years. Basically they're exploring the contents of a 2 disk CD Shareware set and more or less trying to run/play/review the 2000 programs on the disks.
It's a fantastic snapshot in time of the pre-internet CD-ROM era.