A Jukebox for your PC: 1993's CDROM Servers

a while back I made a video about my CD-ROM Tower this scuzzy storage array that's packed with Nakamichi CD-ROM drives that all have built-in five disc Changers so your PC could access 35 disks automatically with no manual disk swapping and that video was a lot of fun I'd like to think but there was a lot more to that story the tower was one product among many and a whole Market that existed for a brief period in the 90s I'm not sure if there was a concrete term for these things but I've been calling them CD-ROM libraries I have a couple of them on my desk here and probably pictures of some more floating next to me and these are all similar products in as much as their ways to access a lot of CDs but they work in very different ways and they're intended for very different purposes I'd wanted to cover all this stuff in that first video but I had to trim it down because I ran into problems for instance this is a Pioneer laser memory DRM 1804x which I received before I made the first video and I had every intent to use it trouble is I got it I tested it it wouldn't read any disks and when I opened it up to investigate this fell out into my hand that's the lens for the laser assembly you can see that in the background there so these things are so old they're literally crumbling to bits so I got another one the DRM 602x this turned out to work but the software for controlling it properly no longer exists and even if I had it it's just not very impressive to see in action as I'll show you later there's really not that much to look at and worse these were just the ones I could actually get the models I really wanted are pretty much all gone I seem to have missed the boat they all finished going in the dumpster a couple years ago but really the devices themselves were never as significant as what they were used for so I've decided to go ahead and cover that story as best I can so I can put all this stuff behind me I will say I have no first-hand experience with any of this stuff it only happened for a brief moment in history and most of what I think I know is inferred from magazine articles and books that weren't very detailed so please take it all with a grain of salt and check the comments for the people correcting me but assuming I get any of this right let's start with the question of why anyone actually wanted huge CD-ROM drives in that first video I made up a guy who got so unreasonably annoyed at swapping discs while playing video games that he built a machine that could hold dozens of them when he needed a disc he'd just pick a virtual drive and a few seconds later that disc was loaded up and ready to use that's what CD libraries did they automated Disk Management so a person didn't have to lay hands on a drive every time a new disc was needed but that video was mostly a joke you'd have to be pretty picky to spend thousands on Hardware just to avoid the occasional disk Swap and I doubt many individuals ever bought them businesses on the other hand had genuine need for accessing tons of CDs a number of needs actually some of them were obvious and they actually continue to be relevant almost up to the present day but in their Heyday CD libraries mostly served one very unique and temporary purpose for which you have to understand why CD-ROMs themselves were an exciting technology yeah oh boy that thing's so heavy yeah let's pretend we're in about 1993 to keep things simple now there have been two major changes between then and now in the way we store and deliver data one is that hard drives have gotten far bigger and cheaper and the other is that the internet has become ubiquitous and Incredibly fast since these are those things was true in 93 it was tough to get or store large amounts of data and CD-ROM changed that overnight in an era when the average computer user had never made a file larger than a megabyte CD-ROMs stored over 600 of them that's over half a gig at a time when most people never actually heard the word gigabyte CD-ROMs offered a staggering amount of storage considering the technology they more or less displaced was the floppy disk which was about 450 times smaller trouble is CD-ROMs didn't replace floppies even if we talk about the late stage stuff like cdrws with packet writing they still just didn't really serve the same purpose so a lot of explanation behind that just take my word for for it nobody ever saw CDs as a true replacement for floppies especially since you couldn't even buy writable discs in 1993. I mean Enterprises could but no consumer had that A CD-ROM was exactly what it said on the tin read only memory so I can say that a CD is 400 times bigger than a floppy or three times bigger than a consumer hard drive and it sounds impressive but these things don't really compare the only thing you could actually do with CDs that you couldn't before was to receive massive data dumps from businesses but that led to a kind of quiet crisis a decade-long push by software vendors to figure out what the hell to do with this new and Incredibly powerful delivery Channel because consumers just didn't really have a use for that much data the myth was that CDs would Grant access to these incredible resources whole research libraries that collected works as Shakespeare and all that nonsense but in the few cases where this panned out at all in my experience it was really just a solution looking for a problem software vendors would have you believe there was a CD-ROM Revolution but of all the software I remember from the time most of it was maybe 10 or 20 Megs sure it wouldn't fit on a floppy you can get close to that on a floppy disk but it certainly didn't fill a whole CD-ROM and all the stuff that did pretty much amounted to crappy textbooks everyone had that copy of Encarta that came with their PC that they ran once and there were gobs of other edutainment apps that pretty much consisted of again textbooks with the occasional video clip baked in very little real increase in educational value and most people weren't all that interested in owning large quantities of reference materials anyway you can put a whole encyclopedia on one disc there is a whole encyclopedia if there had been CDs with whole libraries on them I never saw one the collected works of Michael Crichton had been available on disk I would have asked my parents for that but as far as I know it never happened and since the quality of most CD-ROM software was pretty poor on average if somebody was publishing public domain books or whatever they were probably pretty unpleasant to read and even then books just only take up so much space I can't imagine any company managing to fill up even half a CD that way so in the 90s nobody could shut up about how big CD-ROMs were the biggest Arena of computers today the biggest arena is in the CD-ROMs but you had to fill them with something people actually wanted and that meant video games the seventh guest and Mist were celebrated at the release and for decades afterwards as killer apps for the CD-ROM format and the reason they made such good use of that much storage is because they were composed entirely of sound and video clips the only things consumers were interested in that could fill up a whole disk later on this would change but in my eyes the consumer CD-ROM Revolution that supposedly happened in the early 90s was a marketing stunt it didn't really change Computing all that much in the business World however CDs had a profound impact on how a lot of companies operated right away in fact it even made some of them walk back from technology they already had that was ahead of its time in the 90s business applications started to get really big software development environments Graphics packages and office suites to name a few things we're beginning to fill up whole CDs with useful content if you bought Borland C plus plus in 1993 you'd find that just the help file was nine and a half Megs that would have spanned seven floppy disks all on its own in fact a lot of floppy based software didn't include built-in documentation at all for that reason you're expected to just read the paper manual so this was definitely an improvement likewise office suites could include tons of templates and clip art that would have previously sold as a separate product since it didn't make sense to ship an extra 15 floppy disks for media most people would never need so these were benefits for everyone but then there were product categories that were only useful to businesses and only really practical thanks to CD-ROM content libraries are a great example that's stuff like stock photos and clipart that are taken for granted now since we can just grab them off Google images or shutters stock if we're planning on selling anything but in 1993 print quality images would have cost a fortune to download so companies bought products like the Corel professional photos collection this one uploaded to internet archive consists of photos and categories like India fruits and vegetables and wolves spanning nearly 200 CDs it's as if you have 300 huge file cabinets that's over a hundred gigs of photos downloading that would have been in no uncertain terms impossible let alone storing it in 93 you could barely buy a one gig hard drive at all and you'd need a hundred of them to store all that material so a graphic design shop would have found this product invaluable another example is sound effects famously almost every sound in the game Doom came from a single collection called sound ideas that Bobby Prince just bought off the shelf oh specifically sound ideas 6000 which was an enormous collection spanning 40 discs I don't know if those were plain CD audio or wave files but they would have been basically identical in size since audio compression wasn't very common at the time so this collection would have been about 25 gigs again that would have been more storage than every single machine at ID software in 1993 combined there are plenty more products in this vein you can flip to the back of any magazine of the era and find ads for similar things and they were still being sold well up into the 2000s this here click art 950 000 is presumably nearly a million images this was sold in 2004 and it spans a whole grip of CDs I think there's a five or eight in here what do we got what do we got disc disk disk disk disk disk disk five six seven seven discs now these ones are extensively for non-commercial purposes so I guess office memos greeting cards whatever but the point is that even a decade later it was still hard to get large amounts of high quality imagery online so this sort of product was a Priceless resource for Creative businesses I'm glad I bought this I needed a good like physical bit you know how much I hate doing videos without any props just kills me but there was yet another kind of CD-ROM product that was also very important but only really made sense to large businesses and that was data yeah I know I just described a whole bunch of that but I'm using this word in a very specific way think about a typical office job you know the sort that isn't entirely about computers they do exist imagine being an insurance adjuster a lawyer or a city planner for any of those you need to access to tons of information the adjuster needs Actuarial tables the lawyer needs case law and statute the planner needs historical rainfall figures and topological Maps then as now there were companies that maintained these huge pools of raw data it was the original meaning of the term database just a gigantic pile of collected facts there have been Services going back centuries that aggregated this kind of info and made it available in all kinds of forms like uh in the 60s you'd go to the library and find some enormous paper Tome with rainfall figures for every U.S zip code going back 120 years cross reference with pollution estimates that kind of thing this was a big business for eons and it still is of course nowadays you'd get it all online if you're a lawyer and you to know about eminent domain you go to the website for Westlaw or LexisNexis you type in whatever you want and the server spits back a list of Articles sorted by relevance age whatever but in 1993 okay well in this specific example you'd actually do the exact same thing and probably an 83 or 73 as well this is a favorite topic of mine the two companies I just named Westlaw and LexisNexis have basically a monopoly on Legal Information they were launched in 1975 and 73 respectively and right from the get-go they offered online access to their libraries you can set up a terminal at your law office that connected to their system at first over dedicated least lines or dial up then over the early wide area networks like timnet and finally over the Internet they had a query interface they could Whittle down millions of Records to just the specific ones you needed just like we expect now only it was 50 years ago when most people had never seen or heard of anything like this not even a library index terminal so that's a fun tangent but it's also relevant because it means that by 1993 the concept of an online searchable database was very old hat I'm sure companies in other fields offered similar Services if you need weather data you could either get a link up to the NWS or probably some company that aggregated their info but as you can imagine online access of any kind cost a ton at the time internet connections weren't yet Universal even for big businesses and the cost of connecting to any network service was substantial to put it mildly things got even worse if the resources you needed were pictures or raw scientific data DNA structures Precision USGS maps that kind of stuff could add up to hundreds of Megs which would have choked out even a T1 and on the provider side they'd have needed enormous pipes to serve it all up so if a business couldn't pull this stuff over the wire then the only way to query it would be to have the whole thing on hand but for a law library or Geological Survey data that could be gigabytes in an era when a gig was still an incredible amount of storage consider that in 1993 a typical hard drive was none gigs if you bought a consumer PC it probably had between 80 and 600 Megs of storage large larger drives existed but they cost nearly a buck a Meg so 1.7 gigs ran around 1400 in a world where a 500 Meg hard drive was pretty damn big and only the largest Enterprises could afford a 1.5 megabit internet connection imagine what a single CD represented more storage than a whole workstation on a disk that cost almost nothing to make so imagine if it was 2005. you have a 120 gig hard drive in your PC and a five megabit internet connection and now someone hands you a half terabyte SD card downloading that much data would take three weeks and then you'd have nowhere to put it but just plug in this little tiny chip and you have it all right away it would have blown your mind CD-ROMs were no different and what we're talking about here is the long enduring secret weapon of mass data transfer sneakernet even my gigabit internet which I'm lucky enough to have at home doesn't compare to a van full of hard drives doing 70 on the freeway and in 1993 the joke was the same except you'd say that a T3 didn't compare to a FedEx envelope 4 full of CD-ROMs CDs also took up less space and used less power than hard drives they were easier to maintain and manage they didn't wear out and they were virtually impossible to damage unless you acted like a dumbass you can't head crash a CD-ROM drive and if it dies you just take the disc out and put it in another drive you don't even need a clean room to do it plus you only need a one-time investment rather than a hard drive that has to be replaced periodically or a network service that costs money every day whether you use it or not so for all these reasons even if those database providers had online services they also began offering programs where you could pay probably thousands of dollars a month to receive regular shipments of CDs with their latest data and that was really appealing so much so that some of those companies that had Direct connections to data services in the 70s and 80s were working with them exactly the way we do now with the internet actually abandoned those direct connections when CD-ROMs became available because having the data on hand cost a lot less and was a lot more convenient in fact even if you're as young as I you might remember one of these Services the Microsoft developer Network or msdn it's just a website nowadays but it used to be a series of CDs for the latest Windows apis documentation and software delivered to developers on a regular schedule and that service still existed up until fairly recently and thus you can see that our notional 1993 office might have owned a lot of CDs I suppose it's a pretty big company we're talking about here with fingers and a lot of Pies they might have had all these things at once stock photos Graphics apps software development Suites msdn one or more databases and any of those could have been a multi-disc set that Corel library was probably an outlier at 200 disks but even Westlaw might have been a dozen although this is where we run into the really big problem with this story I don't know how big these sets really were because as far as I can tell they're all gone I get the impression that companies sometimes had whole boxes these things shipped quarterly or even monthly so there should be tens of thousands of them out there but I've never found I've never even seen a picture of a West loss CD my assumption is that very few people with access to this stuff would have had any desire to take it home what lawyer was going to walk out with a crate under their arm full of superseded case law but I also suspect that the terms of the subscriptions required the disks to be returned or destroyed so they couldn't get smuggled out and sold at a lower price to people who didn't need the most up-to-date info or didn't even know they were being scammed so my guess is that all these discs got shredded long ago and that's why I've never found one at least until last year when I bought my second eduquest machine it arrived with a disc in the drive and it was sort of the thing I'd been looking for it's not a huge Library like I hoped but it's a good example I've since lost that disc so I don't have it hold up for the camera but I uploaded it to internet archive before I lost it so here's that PNG this is newsbank science Source a databases scientific papers and actually a surprisingly late edition it was published in mid 99 although has data all the way back to September 87 and this really is a great example because I can see exactly how it would have been useful in its day here's the software it runs under dos that's a pretty simple interface if you were a researcher who needed to find out as much as you could about bees you could type in bees and there you go dates and names of 87 papers about bees you could also narrow your search to say only papers that mention bees and pollination there 17 papers and then for each one you can see the publication it appeared in and when it was published as well as who wrote it and in most cases a summary of the article I'm not sure if this is verbatim or if it's been Abridged I suspect the latter nowadays of course we would expect a lot more the complete article in PDF format with images in the original layout but at the time that probably wasn't practical for one thing before digital distribution had really been taken into full account by IP law it probably would have been very hard to license this sort of thing but also most PCS had very limited Graphics capability and since just the digest take up 130 Megs we can guess the full text let alone images would have far exceeded one disk and that's pretty cool because this does actually challenge the yawning vastness of the CD-ROM format I mean imagine having this in 93 despite not having internet access you could still filter through tens of thousands of Articles from the comfort of your office you'd still have to go to the library eventually but you wouldn't have to get out of your seat until you had a printout of exactly what you were looking for in hand compare that to pulling out every copy of every periodical going back a decade and skimming every article by hand or flipping through print digest Page by Page searching for keywords and making notes for hours on end this CD would have been career altering so having labored the point we can all agree that CD-ROMs were probably a godsend for businesses but once you had the discs you had to give all your employees access and that was complicated you could of course just pass them around as needed if everyone had a CD-ROM drive that worked well enough if you had 20 employees at least until Jeff went on vacation and left the msdn collection locked in his office but with 200 employees or a thousand it would be untenable if you've worked in corporate I.T you probably know how miserable it can be to get a new workstation loaded up you need Windows Microsoft Office antivirus internal tools all that stuff nowadays just about everyone uses disk Imaging but I'm pretty sure that wasn't in Vogue yet by 93. so instead you'd have to load all that stuff from original Media One disk at a time maybe an Enterprise buys two or three or even 10 copies of Visual Studio but in a really big office those could all be in use at once loading machines all over campus or they could be forgotten in some desk drawer so even with a dozen copies you might not be able to find one when you need it and what if someone scratches or breaks a disc now you're out 800 bucks these days you could just copy all the disks onto a hard drive and share it on the network and that was technically feasible in 93 but cost prohibitive even servers were using drives of only a gigabyte or two and just a couple CDs could fill that space up so the disks themselves had to be made available on the network directly and this is where CD libraries come in if you had something like my scuzzy tower you could plug that into a Novell or a Windows NT file server share all those drives then go to any PC on the network and select one and your request will get directed to the right disk in the right drive if that disk isn't loaded then the drive locates it and racks it up and Bam now you can access any of your install media from anywhere on the network that way disks don't need to walk around the office and get lost and scratched and broken they can all be locked up inside this machine in a secure closet and still available to everyone it's a great solution and I've spoken to people who confirm that that's exactly how these were used but this Tower is an odd specimen compared to most there were two major types of CD libraries meant for addressing two very different problems in scenario number one you have a lot of CDs maybe dozens or even hundreds but you only need to access any given disk once in a long while for instance that Corel photo library that sure is a lot of disks but you're only going to need a couple photos from any one of those in any given moment if you've got a couple artists working on a magazine or whatever they're not likely to need hundreds of photos from all over the place very quickly it's more likely to be a couple pictures from One disk and a couple pictures from another one and then a long Gap while they lay out text and Vector art and whatnot if that's your situation then you need solution number one a CD jukebox just like the music machines a jukebox contains one or more actual disk readers and then it has storage for a much larger number of disks when you request a disk a robot selects it from storage and puts it in a drive very much like the tape robot from hackers a real thing that did in fact get used at TV stations this kind of mechanism can't access a lot of disks simultaneously but it can select a couple at a time from a potentially enormous Library this is a concept known as near Line storage kind of a funky word because it sits in between two existing Storage Solutions online storage where all your data is available at all times like when you have a bunch of hard drives that are constantly running and offline storage which is like tape backups where you have data sitting in a banker's box in a closet and you can't access it unless someone physically retrieves it and puts it in a drive online storage is sometimes important but it wastes power and maintenance if you don't need to access all your data at all times the bankers box on the other hand is inconvenient if you don't know exactly what you're looking for or need to get to Something in the middle of the night when the closet's locked up near-line storage splits the difference rarely used files aren't available instantly but they can become available pretty fast without any human intervention you just have to wait for the robot okay now scenario number two you have a small number of disks but you need to access them all the time with minimal delay or maybe you do have a ton of disks and you need to access all of those all the time with no delay and you have a lot of money that's where the second type of Library comes in this doesn't really have a name as far as I can tell they're basically just a bunch of CD-ROMs in a server there's no special mechanisms just ordinary CD-ROM drives but the idea is you dedicate one drive to each CD for as many disks as you need available at once this is essentially online storage there's no switching delay when you access data because everything's always mounted compared to hard drive arrays though these cost a lot less and they don't use as much power even when they're running and in fact they don't even need to run all the time hard drives can be spun down when idle but my understanding is that data centers never do this because it induces more wear and tear than just leaving them running so for decades Enterprises have had hundreds or thousands of continuously spinning hard drives eating a kilowatts of power all day and night nowadays of course ssds have massively reduced that energy footprint but that wasn't possible until just a few years ago so while huge arrays CD-ROMs might seem a little silly they probably conferred enormous cost savings both in media and power consumption that said this idea is just put a bunch of CD-ROMs in a server it doesn't seem all that special but even the largest servers at the time and believe me they were bigger back then could only accommodate one or two drives so manufacturers had to make special chassis and some companies sold whole pre-assembled systems with a bunch of drives sometimes 50 or more sometimes even a pre-configured server all as a package deal bringing this guy back again the scuzzy tower is actually one of those products the manufacturer MDI built these cases and sold them with a whole bunch of configurations there were models with just plain single disk drives and then they had stuff all the way up to this setup with all the Nakamichi Changers this is an interesting hybrid between the two types of Library it's sort of like raid one plus zero it has a bunch of independent drives but then each one is a mini jukebox so instead of offering just one or two discs from a pool of hundreds or seven fixed discs at once this presents any seven discs out of a pool of 35. you can see how this could be a useful in-between option of course it's also kind of weird because it's not really a pool 35 is it it's seven pools of five each a disc can only be loaded by the drive it's in so if seven employees happen to pick discs that are all in different drives you're fine but if two people try to pick discs in the same Drive who wins well that's a big subject and we'll talk more about it in a bit but first let's take a closer look at how the usual jukebox machines worked I showed off the mechanism inside those little Nakamichi five disc changers in the last video so you can watch that if you want all the details they were pretty awesome though especially given their compactness and simplicity what I have here however are two much older models from Pioneer in fact I think there's some of the earliest jukeboxes ever made and before we get into it I want you to just take a look at these most jukeboxes were bought by businesses right so if you look at the other products in the market they're you know powder coated steel with panel gaps everywhere they're often rack mounted it's very industrial stuff you wouldn't put it in your home nerds wouldn't admire the look of the footprint but these definitely weren't intended as consumer products these machines however kind of look like they were they've got nice bezels they've got screen printing they're clearly meant to look good sitting on a desk and they'd almost work in like an AV system they're nice looking devices despite my claims that jukeboxes just weren't for individuals I think Pioneer imagined that someone might buy these to use at home and I think it made sense at least for the right person so let's start with the smaller model this is the DRM 602x it cost around thirteen hundred dollars in 1994 and it's an upgraded version of the DRM 600 which came out all the way back in 1991. so I'm going to presume Pioneer was selling something in between those in 93. I do kind of wish I had a 600 because I think it might have been the first jukebox ever sold at least the first one that wasn't some proprietary bespoke system you know just a normal product you could buy and plug in in concept this machine is actually very similar to the nakamichis it takes six discs instead of five you can see the cute little six disc logo on the front here love that little touch it's also much larger of course but it does the same stuff and in much the same way as you'll see this of course connects via scuzzy like most storage devices at the time those are these gigantic 50-pin ports on the back I just plug a cable into those and then into the back of your PC and you're done it doesn't need any drivers because this plays a fun little trick on your computer you can actually see it during boot when the scuzzy controller looks for connected devices it sees what looks like six separate CD-ROM drives this is using a multi-leun technique that I talked about in the previous video you should watch that one if you want more details but basically this plays a shell game with your operating system once your PC starts up whether you have DOS Windows Linux or anything else the unit shows up as six separate CD-ROMs you can see all these drives just show up in Explorer but let's take a look inside this thing if I lift up the logic board you'll see there's just one physical CD transport right in the center it's tough to see what's going on since everything's so dense inside but if I select a drive in Windows the transport moves itself up or down to line up with a slot in the disk storage on the right then the crank arm slides a disc into the reader which spins it up like normal and Bam there's our files if I then click on another Drive however the machine unloads the first disk puts it back into storage moves the carriage and pulls in another in other words this thing is kiting checks it pretends to be multiple drives and when the OS tries to read a disk in a drive that's not actually loaded yet the Jukebox just pretends that that drive is taking a really long time to spin up to cover the little white lie it's telling it like most lies this one will come back to haunt it but we'll get to that so ultimately this just simulates a human hand swapping discs in a single CD-ROM drive and that's how all jukeboxes work this one like I said functions pretty much like the nakamichis they just hadn't yet had time to miniaturize the mechanism that said I don't really understand why the actual CD transport looks as primitive as it does I mean this thing is Barbarian even for 1994. there's a huge solenoid that locks the laser carriage in place when it's powered off no idea why they needed that there's also these enormous linear actuator coils on either side of the reader they seem a lot bigger than they needed to be I mean there were already tiny CD-ROMs by this point the Discman was out so I'm not sure why they built this one in such a caveman style it looks like it's from the 70s but let's move on now this stores discs in these six disc magazines and that's a pretty cool feature most CD jukeboxes end up being big towers with a bunch of slots inside that you couldn't see or touch directly instead there was a port at the top of the front panel often referred to as a mail slot and discs had to be inserted or ejected one at a time through that slot sort of like a civil war revolver with the Pioneer you just put your discs in this cartridge and shove them in the front six at a time this is neat but I'm pretty sure Pioneer did it this way because they were already making six disc changers for home and Automotive use that used the exact same trays and they do have their downsides once you have one of these cartridges out to get to the discs you have to flip out individual trays using these little tiny Nubs on the side here and there's an interlock so you can only do one at a time so to load this mag we flip out the first tray put in a disc swing it in pop out the second one load the next disc and so on again kind of like a civil war revolver it's a little unsettling too because you have to load the discs with the label side down the opposite of every other CD player ever made and you can't just glance through and see what's in a magazine you have to pick at these little tiny Nubs to get each tray to open then pull the disc out without touching the surface and flip it over to see what it is of course they did include label areas on the cartridges to make this a little easier and for what it's worth unloading is a lot more fun than loading and you know this is all still quicker than the Nakamichi changer or any kind of mail slot type jukebox so I can hardly complain and more importantly you can buy a bunch of these magazines pre-load them and then swap out a whole pack at a time and that's super cool suppose you're a software developer you could have a magazine loaded with a bunch of programming resources your msdn library your code samples that sort of thing and at the end of the day when you're ready to relax you just pop one cartridge out and slam in a new one filled with video games or if you wanted music like most CD-ROMs this can play audio there's a headphone jack on the front and even a pair of rcas on the back so you could hook this up to your stereo and at the end of the day just pop in a pack of your favorite albums and relax without even having to walk over to the living room so maybe Pioneer was imagining this being used in the home or maybe they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall since nobody else was selling anything like this it was a completely new product they didn't know what it was going to get used for maybe they thought it would get used for background music in malls or broadcast automation at radio stations or maybe they just already had a CD player mechanism for home and car use they figured why take out the audio parts already there and to that end you'll notice there are no controls on here there's no buttons except eject and power no IR window for a remote control the machine has nothing anywhere on it except the audio jacks and the scuzzy ports it's meant to be operated entirely from software so I figure they weren't too focused on the home listening experience that said it is pretty straightforward to do it this way in Windows you could just open your CD player app pick a drive and hit play and then if you want to change discs you just switch virtual drives the Jukebox unloads one disk puts it another and Away you go this is honestly incredibly slick the other jukebox I have is not so much the DRM 1804x is clearly a much larger unit and it actually didn't come out until 1994 but we'll let that slide this retailed for about twenty five hundred dollars and it accepts three magazines for an 18 disc capacity to put this in perspective again a review described this as 10 gigabytes of storage which was an inconceivable number at the time NASA apparently owned this machine at some point which is almost cool but otherwise it doesn't look too exciting it's just like an overgrown version of the 602 it's got three slots but otherwise all the same stuff it's got the headphone jack eject buttons and on the back we've got scuzzy ports and rcas so it looks like it's just a big version of the 602 but it works very differently first off as you can see there's only two devices showing up during boot there's also only one drive showing up in Explorer the other one is my built-in IDE drive device manager only shows one scuzzy CD-ROM and if we try to click that icon in explore it says there's no disc in the drive but wait didn't we just put 18 discs in the drive well to access those we would have to operate the changer the other systems I've shown you inferred what you wanted them to do based on which Virtual Drive you picked but there were problems with that approach to give you an idea when I power up my PC with the scuzzy tower attached it adds an extra five minutes to the boot process as it goes through and checks which discs are in the trays the same thing happens if you hit refresh in Windows Explorer and there are even more issues that once again we'll come back to you I promise I'm getting to that part but most industrial jukeboxes including this one avoid all those potential problems because they expect you to be explicit about everything the actual reader in this machine is just a plain old CD-ROM if there's a disk in it it'll read it if not it just says it's empty because it is to load a disk you're expected to use special software to talk to the robot mechanism which they call the changer and tell it explicitly what you want it to do of course that special software is gone long gone Windows had built-in support for this it's some point but these drives are too old for it to work and the official tools are lost to time nobody has cared about these things in 30 years so the only utility that seems to survive from this whole industry is an open source thing called MTX which is actually intended for tape libraries which is a whole different subject and I had that working at one point but I can't get it to function anymore and fortunately that's moot because like I said this unit doesn't actually work the laser assembly fell apart so it can't read anything and since I figured it was probably trashed anyway I tried to fix it on the principle of what am I going to do break it worse but no dice I used some very weak glue to tack the lens back into the cavity but it still won't read anything it does try it pulls a disk into the reader it moves the lens it fires the laser it spins up the disc but after a second it just gives up Waits and repeats so very probably this will never read a disc again I do have a little footage from back when I had the software working and you can see that the loading mechanism functions but it's almost as dense in size as the 602 so it's tough to see what's really going on it does the same basic routine though it pulls a disc out of a slot puts it in the reader or it takes it off the reader and puts it in a slot we can imagine the end user software would have been a little text mode utility that asks which disk you want and then loads it up or a Windows app that does the same thing with some buttons you know we're probably not missing out on much there the concepts here are pretty straightforward I really wish I could have demoed one of the more serious industrial ones that came out later but what can you do it's hard to find good pictures of most of those things but I did find an old German Ebay listing for one that really makes my point this is the Pioneer DRM 5004x now if the 602 took six discs and the 1804 takes 18 then you'd think this one takes 50 but instead it takes 500. it's as if you have 300 huge file cabinets again for perspective that's about 318 gigs although I'm not sure when this one came out so maybe that wasn't as impressive but at any rate it's built more like like most CD jukeboxes were it still uses magazines but instead of six discs per they take a hundred I think it's 50 on either side and there's a vertically traveling swing arm that picks discs from the slots to put into the readers at the bottom this is really cool and it gives you a much better idea how the average Enterprise jukebox worked but it also gives you an idea how logistically challenging this could be told you I told you told you we're going to talk about the problems it's time to talk about the problems the purpose of a machine like this would certainly have been to share a library of disks with a whole network but that means potentially lots of concurrent users and in that situation you couldn't just expose all 500 disks as Network shares and let the OS sort it all out because it wouldn't I suggested that you could load your whole 200 disk Corel photo library into one of these things and you could with plenty of room to spare but there's only actually two drives in there so what if your artists need a lot of images when you only have one or two real drives and then three users ask for different disks well there aren't enough drives to service all those requests someone has to lose this is a problem and if you have a lot of users all asking for different disks there's going to be a lot more losers than winners and that's an even bigger problem if you were very lucky this might have been tolerable if you knew the usage patterns of your data somehow you could maybe load up your disks strategy basically for instance I accidentally made a good contrived example in the last video I loaded all my ribbon disks into one drive so I wouldn't have to swap them but lots of people pointed out that if I'd spread the disks across five separate drives I could have avoided swapping even inside the Changers all five could have been available simultaneously that wouldn't have been as funny I think but it was definitely the ideal solution maybe in some environments this sort of strategizing was feasible but I doubt you could really predict this sort of thing across dozens or hundreds of employees and disks so that left you in some real trouble users would be constantly asking your jukebox to service incompatible requests in the worst case you ran something that I've seen called changer thrashing that happens if multiple users are trying to access data when the server doesn't understand that that data is coming from a jukebox see from the perspective of a typical OS CDs are just generic mass storage what we call block devices that means when a process asks for a file it requested as a series of blocks if you user one asks for a block from disk one then the server asks the drive to get it and if the disk is already loaded it just reads it and spits it back if user 1 asks for the next block it then reads that as well but suppose instead that after block 1 user 2 shows up and asks for a block from disk 2. the server will now ask the drive to get that so the Jukebox proceeds to switch disks spin up the new one and retrieve the data and while all that's happening user number one is stuck waiting for their next block of data if the server doesn't understand how this is all working behind the scenes it might just put user one's request right in the queue so user 2 finishes their read the drive switches gets a block from user 1 and user 2 is now waiting again so it switches back reads one block and so on and so forth Ron Burgundy will read whatever's on his teleprompter so if the server just blindly asks for data from two disks simultaneously the Jukebox is gonna have to switch back and forth between them over and over only reading one little tiny chunk of data every time and that swap takes 8 to 10 seconds so both users are going to see a trend transfer rate of essentially zero to test this I plugged in the 35 disc Tower and the results were much worse than I expected if I just go in and click on a drive the Nakamichi mounts the disk like normal this is copying at full 16 times speed but what if I now start a copy from a second Drive yeah this is bad the Nakamichi is thrashing Windows thinks these are two separate physical drives that can be read simultaneously the changer has painted itself into a corner by telling its little white lies about how it works inside it's now helpless to refuse the os's Absurd requests because he doesn't have a verb for wait these instructions are stupid so it's condemned to do this for hours and hours until the mechanism fails in fact let me be honest with you I've been telling some fibs in both the first video and this one Windows hates these drives oh oh it hates them so much this is the ludovico technique for operating systems I you not I felt morally dirty making windows do these things it really doesn't understand what's going on and it keeps doing crap like trying to query the contents of all 35 discs at once which as far as I can tell makes the whole thing lock up the drives will try to read one disc then switch to another and then all the lights on front of all the drives will flash all activity stops I think it's actually confusing the drive so badly that it's resetting the scuzzy bus or or maybe even crashing the firmware and while all this is going on Explorer is completely hung and then every time a drive comes back with a little bit of data it just immediately attempts to query some other bit of minutia about the disk and the whole process starts all over again I've seen Windows blue screen in this situation I've seen it take over 20 minutes to boot because it has to go through a dozen of these cycles and I've even seen it return outright incorrect results like when I try to under NT four and it just said all the drives were unreadable now much of this is due to these specific drives and their little Joker's trick that they're playing on the OS it can hardly be blamed for not understanding the chaos that it's inducing but even if these had manual jukebox mechanisms how would Windows know not to honor any given requests to switch disks this is bad enough on one PC what about a network server what if 50 users go in and click on 50 discs in the same jukebox what if two users try to access different parts of one CD at the same time is it going to read one block from one track then seek to the other read one block and repeat so they just get a couple kilobytes per second this is a mess surely these are not acceptable answers this has to be arbitrated well apparently it wasn't necessarily the earliest review I found of the pioneer 1804 describes this phenomenon says that two users trying to use the same drive would drop the effective transfer to almost nothing since it spent all its time seeking there's no solution proposed here it just says it's not a great idea and leaves it at that this is a catastrophic outcome you'd think nothing would have been shipped until they solved this and obviously there were Solutions unfortunately I can't find clear answers on how they all worked okay I just had to stop shooting because my girlfriend stopped me and said I unlocked a memory when she was in school Circa in 97 98 all the kids would file into the computer lab and they'd sit down to look at some stuff in Encarta they'd be told okay everybody in row One Mount the network share and start in Carta and then once they got to the article everyone was supposed to be looking at they tell them to stop and then the next row of kids could go in open the same disk and load the same thing so they all weren't hitting the same CD at once really funny to me that I didn't even have to wait for the comments to come back on this video to confirm this narrative I'll mix that in somewhere thank you in short however CD libraries were always expected to be used with some kind of specialized management software one such program was scuzzy Express made by the people who built my CD Tower the most detailed review I found was from 97 but they were making it in 93 and I get the impression it was largely the same as I understand it this would index all the disks in your jukebox itself in software then cache their file listings and expose them as virtual directories which you could then share on the network so the OS wouldn't have to worry about all the metadata stuff when a user accessed a directory nothing would happen until they tried to read a file and only then would the software tell the Jukebox to load up the appropriate disk this mitigates the issue right off the top by eliminating thrashing from users just looking through the library for a file they want another feature that was at least there by 97 was disk caching scuzzy Express would let you add a hard drive that would store copies of recently accessed files again this wouldn't completely cure the problem but if you had a few disks that were being used heavily it was likely they'd be in the cache and any requests would just go to the hard drive it's not a total solution but it gets you closer without the expense of a full-size hard drive array another solution could have been scheduling which apparently did happen although I couldn't find any explanation of how it worked the way I picture it instead of handling things block by block the software could have managed access in terms of sessions suppose user 1 starts reading a file off a disk and then user 2 requests one from another the software could ensure that user one gets to copy one whole file or at least a couple megabytes Worth or at least 30 seconds worth before it puts that transaction on hold and lets user 2 get some time this would again not solve the problem completely but it would go a long way PC Magazine reviewed several CD server packages and described the existence of scheduling algorithms didn't explain how any of them worked apparently they struggled with the problem but scuzzy Express scored the highest marks for throughput so I really wish I could find a copy I did find documentation for a Linux based CD server package which I might be able to find it's supposedly off quota management to address this problem but I couldn't find any explanation of how that worked either so this is all shrouded by the fog of time there don't seem to be great answers at least for me but I think we get the general outline as cool as these systems were in theory they had some intrinsic problems I don't really know what you could safely put in a 500 disk changer that wouldn't get Beat to Death by a huge pool of users the best use case I could think of would be cold storage archival data that you know will be accessed so rarely that no two people are likely to hit it at once but you want it readily available when needed business records for instance back taxes old invoices contracts stuff like that you might be legally mandated to keep on file for years and maybe you never use any of it but you want it there right away if you need it and that brings us to another factor in the world of business CD-ROM burners they existed in 93 businesses could afford them and they definitely played a role here backing up data is a tremendous pain it was then it still is now there's a whole subreddit dedicated to people trying to figure out how to store lots of data without const an effort to keep it alive the general consensus is you can't don't try everything rots everything degrades burn CDs tapes powered down hard drives ssds they all die even if they're sitting in a cool dark place your best bet is to buy huge spinning discs put them in raid arrays monitor them and be ready to replace them when not if they stop working and nobody has found a truly Superior Solution no don't bring up tape we're not having that discussion the options were even more limited in 93 than they are now but cdrs were available and I've heard although I can't confirm that manufacturers at the time claimed they could last hundreds of years and even if you didn't buy the longevity story archiving The CDR still had a lot going for it 650 Megs might be all the data your company could produce in a year a burner cost about four thousand dollars is a pittance for any Corporation and he'd produce a disc that was immune to both magnetic fields and head crashes the possibility of the data layer falling off or being eaten by mold was distant enough if it was even known at all for the math to make sense if you were that worried about it you could spend another 10 bucks and burn a second disc but of course that would mean that every year or every month you'd have another disc or two to add to the pile and they would just pile up over time this was true for backup tapes too but you'd usually send those off to be stored in some cave or whatever and who cares if you have 20 or 200 if you have to go get a courier to retrieve them anyway a 500 disk CD jukebox on the other hand could hold 40 Years of monthly backups in a pretty small space while still letting you access anyone at the drop of a hat that was unparalleled in a few ways and I guess that's what a lot of these things got used for but even for that purpose there were actually other Solutions already using formats that consumers never even heard of for one thing there was a whole galaxy of Technologies called worm or write once read many these weren't necessarily CDs I mean maybe some were I'm not really sure I think all the Technologies were proprietary and there were like 15 different competing formats I haven't really seen documentation on how any of them worked but then then on top of all of that there was Magneto Optical the mo format was pretty far ahead of its time it stored several hundred Megs on a disk very similar to a CD in form factor but with very different technology so closer to the way that many disks worked it was also really old it hit the market in about 1986. now these never really stopped being cost prohibitive for consumers but businesses used them for ages the original next workstation for instance shipped with one in 1988. the earlier ones were just another kind of worm technology but by the early 90s before the cdrw even existed rewritable Mo disks were available in sizes up to 650 Megs and by 1994 multiple companies including Connor and HP were selling jukeboxes that worked exactly like the CD variety but with the advantage that the discs weren't just writable or even rewritable but Random Access rewritable just like cdrws after writing to an Mo disk you have to erase it before you can write new data but the disks have hard sectors which allow a drive to erase just one chunk of data at a time and rewrite only that block so effectively they can be treated like big slow floppy disks very similar to the DVD Ram format that came out a decade later now this is huge as a business you'd much rather do incremental daily backups rather than wait a week or a month before you can run off a new disk to avoid wasting blank media at a time when CD blanks still cost significant money so for this and other reasons as I understand it Mo jukeboxes did have significant uptick and in fact a decade later I found that there was a medium none of us has probably heard of that was basically created to replace it and may have succeeded not that anyone would know unless you worked for a huge health insurance company or something that format was called Udo it was based on the same technology as Blu-ray although it came out a year or two before that hit the market it could store a little bit more data about 30 gigs per disk and it was sold in cartridges identical to Magneto Optical I'd guess that was so you could upgrade your library in place from Mo to Udo by just swapping out the readers and the disks rather than throwing out a huge piece of data center Furniture whether that actually happened given the plummeting costs of hard drives and lto tape I couldn't tell you for sure but the drives in the media you can buy them on eBay for pretty reasonable prices so I'm going to go ahead and guess this had some uptake so to sum up Optical libraries started out with a few very special use cases and then those started dropping like flies over just the next few years but some of those functions stuck around at least into the mid-2000s just not in places most of us ever would have seen them towards the end of this whole process however something interesting happened Optical libraries actually became available to Consumers I mean okay by this point a number of people have gone hey wait I had 100 disc CD changer in the 90s these have always been around and yes that is literally a CD jukebox but to my knowledge none of those things supported data disks you couldn't plug them into your PC if you know otherwise please get in touch I'd love to see a machine that could do that but as far as I know all those Changers could only play audio likewise the DVD and Blu-ray versions that came out in the 2000s could only play movies and probably nobody minded that because once again consumers just never had much need for massive collections of data disks and so when DVD the next major Optical format dropped in 1996 most people didn't get excited about it as a data format even though it was like rolling back the clock to the early 90s once again DVDs stored 7 to 14 times more data than CDs and once again they held a couple times more data than the average consumer hard drive but the average person and even most exceptional people still weren't doing anything that produced more than a few Megs of output and on top of that DVDs didn't even replace CDs for software distribution most programs still came on CD-ROM right up until Optical drives disappeared from computers entirely so DVD as a data format was even less relevant than CD-ROM had been people still didn't have a need to rack up hundreds of disks for immediate access but you know what came on DVD that people did want to do that with movies people built massive collections of DVDs immediately like the format kicked off an era of media consumption that I feel made VHS pale in comparison folks might have had some big tape collections in the 90s but it feels like by 2001 you could throw a rock and hit someone's room filling DVD Library there were so many people watching movies every day just binging them for hours you can imagine some of them wished they could just load up all the movies every single one all at once and you could do that with the power file c200 but you probably wouldn't want to because it's a big piece of I mean to be clear it might not be possible to build something like this that isn't a big piece of but I poured hours into getting this one working and now I think it's a kind of Torment Nexus a device that exists to bring only pain but I'm getting ahead of myself the power file is another Optical jukebox and a much newer one it was made in the year 2000 and it cost a bit under 2 000. it's an enormous and entirely plain metal box I mean even compared to most AV center components this thing is basic the back has some firewire ports which was more in Vogue by this point than scuzzy and then there's a power plug that's it the top tells a story of a machine that's been treated pretty poorly in its Twilight years but also shows off the firewire logo stamped into the metal which is a pretty strange branding decision if you ask me but this kind of machine doesn't need to look flashy because its value is all about what it can do it has not one but two DVD readers inside and a capacity of 200 disks so yeah an awful lot of people could fit their whole movie collection into one of these plus all 10 seasons of The Simpsons and still have room to spare I was sad to learn actually that there were over 3 000 movies on DVD by the year 2000 because that means I can't make a joke about loading every DVD in existence into this thing but you could make some inroads these can daisy chain up to at least three units and that's 600 discs or about 900 hours of entertainment and I don't see why you couldn't plug another three machine chain into your max second firewire port to get 1200 discs or around 1800 hours of video at which point your local Blockbuster would probably be posting guys outside in white Vans to keep an eye on you the is an incredible volume of media on its face but the theoretical data capacity here is really absurd if you do the math and it remained that way for much longer than you might expect a DVD stores at least 4.7 gigs so the minimum capacity of just one of these libraries is close to a terabyte at a time when hard drives stored less than 30 gigs on average most of us didn't even have terabyte hard drives a decade later so this is pretty remarkable but we're back to the early CD-ROM days again if you're interested in DVD for its data capacity that barely matters because this machine is only for consuming unless you got the power file r200 which came with a pair of DVD burners this almost seems absurd I mean there are bulk disk burning systems out there of course but usually you want the disc to go in a little pile when they're done so you can put them in envelopes not just stay inside the burner until you manually eject them which is what you'd have to do with this but imagine if you were a photographer for instance every time you do a shoot you could put a fresh disc in the machine burn your photos to it and just leave it in there now they're all safely archived but they're available at a moment's notice and you can pull one out and take it with you if need be you have a physical embodiment of your digital portfolio sitting right next to your desk same deal if you're a videographer you could run off DVDs of every finished product that's a pretty cool idea curiously though the manual says nothing about burning ordinary CDs or DVDs it only mentions the DVD Ram format that's odd and I don't know if it's actually a limitation but you know let's roll with it because that's even cooler DVD Ram disks basically functioned like slow flash drives a 5.2 gig ram disk cost about forty dollars in the year 2000 so if this was the r model what I'd have here would be 1040 gigs of removable random access storage for about eight grand which sounds like a lot but gig for gig and not counting the cost of the power file itself it was still cheaper than most hard drives plus you didn't have to fill the whole thing at once when you bought it you could start out with just one disk then buy new ones as you filled them up and anytime you could pull out any five gig chunk of data and just take it with you in other words this was the home gamer version of the Enterprise Magneto Optical Library which is pretty wild for a consumer product whether you were a pathological movie buff or a data hoarder this thing was pretty cool trouble is there's a lot of parts of it that just suck for instance the local UI is aqua word as hell like all other jukeboxes it's meant to be operated via software but there is a screen and some buttons on the front and you do unfortunately need to interact with them from time to time the buttons are really unpleasant to press and the screen is incredibly hard to see because it's mounted inside the case you have to look at it through the atomic purple acrylic for some reason why why do this the front is also rounded so as you can see it's virtually impossible to prevent glare when I was getting a close-up of this I had to stick some Gaff tape to the table just to film it clearly there's also some awkwardness with how it handles media and to explain that we should probably take a look at the insides unfortunately the manufacturer didn't put this thing in a clear acrylic case I think they missed a bet there because it actually looks pretty awesome the metal shroud comes off with eight screws then there's a plastic cover inside that just helps keep the discs in place I guess and there we have the machine this Carousel holds all the discs of course that's really the only practical way to build one of these the two drives live in the middle facing in opposite directions and when you pick a disc it rotates the carousel around and a robot arm pushes it into the drive where it gets red like normal first however you naturally have to get the discs into the machine this is also awkward this is a mail slot type machine so you have to load disks one at a time you hit load you wait for the door to open you press the disk gently into the slot and wait for the robot arm inside to pull it in you can't just drop the whole disc in there and you can't let go of it you have to wait with your hand on the disc until it takes it from you and to fill this machine you of course have to do this 200 times insert weight insert weight and so on and every time takes like 8 to 10 seconds fortunately this would only really be a frustration when you're initially setting it up but still it would have been a lot nicer if you could just open the top and drop the discs into the slots other than loading and unloading everything else is done from your PC or let's be realistic here your Mac look at this thing it's obviously meant for Apple hardware and that is my advice anyway since the Mac software actually works the original PC app was reportedly horrible and has been lost to time probably to everyone's benefit media finder X lets you see the status of all connected Changers and drives and the inventory of disks in each one you can select a disk and hit Mount and the Machine will put it into a drive once it's loaded the icon appears on the desktop and you can use it like normal so if I want to watch Animaniacs I just click on the name the carousel leaps into action and a few seconds later there it is on my desktop and I can fire it right up in idvd honestly unironically this would have been a film Buff's dream in 2000 you just asked for a movie and it comes right to you but obviously with 200 discs you don't want them all on the desktop fortunately it only displays the discs that are actually in drives the rest your inventory appears in the manager app and as virtual directories inside a folder on your desktop here we can see all the disks and their titles the software caches the metadata on all the disks in the machine and in fact if they are data disks which does of course support you can poke around and look at their contents without making the machine do any work the file names and sizes are cached so it only actually changes disks once you try to read a file of course all of this requires a jukebox knows what disks are where the missile knows where it is at all times it knows this because it knows where it isn't the machine keeps track of what's in each of the internal slots and if you load a bunch of disks at once as soon as the Jukebox has a chance it will start loading each of those disks and do whatever Drive isn't in use so it can scan the label and contents it's very clever when it works when I was shooting b-roll for this video I spent about two hours fighting with the software because it would load unload and mount disks but it wouldn't index them I have no idea why it's an automatic process I switched machines and it started working running the same software and Os on both machines makes no sense then once I started loading it I ran into more problems the bulk load process worked normally for about 40 disks and then it started fighting me it would load one disk and then immediately begin trying to start the index process so I'd hit the stop button a couple times before it would listen to me and then it would let me load just one disk and then start the index process again won't load no bad bad stop bad dog that dog stop identifying quited on top of that once it finished indexing most of the disks didn't show up in the changer folder until I rebooted the machine which is just bizarre how does that happen I also ran into straight up firmware issues at first I was testing this on Windows and the thing just wouldn't play ball I mean it was working but I'd issue a few simple commands and then get confused it would start thinking there were no disks in the drives even when there were before long the whole thing was unusable I thought this was just because the software sucked so I switched to the mac and it looked so much nicer and more professional and then five minutes later I had it jammed up again just by trying to load and unload this a little bit more quickly than expected so the firmware seems very fragile and unlike a LaserJet printer when this thing jams it's hell on Earth to unjam it turns out there are no sensors on the disk slots to see if they actually contain disks I certainly didn't expect them on every slot but it seems like this machine doesn't have any at all it just remembers that you put a disk in when slot 10 was open and then assumes it's in slot 10 forever if it's wrong there's no easy way to override it and I couldn't find an option to just scan every slot and find out which ones are empty several times I got into a state where it didn't understand which slots were actually occupied and fixing that was miserable I had to figure out how to get it into service mode it turns out you have to enter the Konami Code basically right right left right right on the keypad then you can tell it to force eject the drives and then dump changer which makes it eject every single disk this takes forever because it wants to rotate to each slot then perform the whole eject sequence four times why four would work when one didn't is anyone's guess even after that it was still pretty confused I had to factory reset it then spend an hour removing all the disks by hand Factory it again reload the discs one at a time to get it back to a usable State during this whole process I had to open the machine up and as I poked around the entrance I just got this very strong feeling the thing was not very well built it almost feels like a hobbyist made it feels like it should be a big 3D printed Open Source Hardware project everything seems very simple and rudimentary like they made it out of off-the-shelf components they didn't though they're all custom parts they're just cheap and crappy so it's no surprise the firmware didn't get as much attention as it deserved either to be fair maybe this thing is tired maybe it doesn't work as well as it did when it was new but I don't really believe that because this is just the fate of consumer robotics mechanisms think about printers for instance those who perennially had problems with their internal State getting out of sync with reality that's after Decades of refinement anything without that much effort behind it is doomed to run into sequencing errors and this machine in particular just doesn't have enough sensors and doesn't question its assumptions enough to prevent that when it is working it's pretty cool when it's identifying new discs for instance it really gets going it's rotating the turntable back and forth loading and unloading DVDs and the names are popping up in the software as it slowly populates everything it looks super cool I'm not entirely sure who the company marketed this thing to I don't actually think many people wanted a 200 disk DVD player to use at home only connected to their computer but if consumer sales were on their radar I really think they should have sold a clear case version It's delightfully distracting to watch it doing its thing when it is behaving it works exactly like you'd hope with very few limitations I wasn't able to fully test this since as it turns out idvd is an incredibly limited app I couldn't even find a way to pick which drive to play from but I'm positive that if you had better player software and you were taught from akwood you could genuinely watch two movies at once but that is just when it's working I couldn't find much contemporary chatter about these things but I imagine anyone who owned one spent less time watching movies than they did cursing at the machine so to go back to our earlier topic I was bummed that I wasn't able to get a hold of one of those Enterprise CD-ROM jukeboxes with the hundreds of disks and the big robot arm but I have to wonder if we didn't just see a preview of what those machines were like an exaggeration maybe but I imagine there's some truth to it since they were targeted at businesses I'm sure they were built more right more sensors better firmware but my gut still says that if you were in charge of feeding and caring for a fleet of disc Changers no matter how much they cost they probably spent more time out of service than in it's just hard to make something like this that works without getting itself confused and if you were a user of those systems even when they worked I have to imagine you spent an awful lot of your time just waiting waiting for it to switch discs waiting for your time slot to come up when contending with 40 other users and waiting for your data to copy off a CD-ROM that was after all probably a lot slower than the hard drive you were used to so like I said at the beginning of this video I don't really know what I'm talking about here there was so little info available that most of this is just speculation or reading between the lines but I get the impression that these things were never a whole lot of fun to use I found them intriguing enough to spend a fortune having them shipped here but I think I'll have no trouble getting rid of them and I won't be mourning this industry either instead I'm just going to count my blessings that we got to where we are a place where a device that fits in a shirt pocket can store more than twice as much data as this whole 200 disk library for a fraction the cost and with a lot less waiting but if you disagree if you remember these things being good then leave a comment I'll welcome your Recollections and corrections but otherwise that's all I've got I can finally get these things out of my studio they've been here for a year and they haven't paid a dime in rent if you enjoyed this video though please subscribe so I know you're into this sort of thing and remember to turn on notifications if you want to find out when I upload new stuff like follow-ups to videos that I said I'd deliver a year ago but if you really enjoyed this then consider supporting me on patreon like these people are doing here that's how I get the money to buy dumb stuff like this over and over until I get one that works only to find out it's super boring anyway it's also how I pay my rent and buy groceries so you know maybe that gets you more excited either way I couldn't afford to do anything I'm doing without the help of these folks I'm so grateful to everyone who's supporting me thank you all so much and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]

Views: 116,290

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: fVgK5NfVMP0

Length: 70min 19sec (4219 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023