[motorized jazz tunes play]
[computer buzzes, beeps] - Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing about a prime early 2000s oddity. One of those artifacts of the time when you just have so many discs you needed a crazy computer
controlled contraption to keep track of them all. So what we're looking at here is the PC Controlled CD organizer
by KDS, "the world's first." So it claims. "Store, search, and
retrieve your discs instantly," with 75 motorized trays. DVDs, audio CDs, VCDs,
games and whatever else, whatever is a disc, you
can put it in there. And this right here, as you can kind of see from the sticker, was a Goodwill find but not by me. This is from LGR Viewer Flo,
who found it while thrifting and offered to send it my way, which I'm very much grateful for because I had never heard of this thing. I didn't even know that this
exact type of device existed. Now, I've seen more advanced
ones and less advanced ones, lots of nifty, interesting approaches to disc storage, towers and containers, but something with
dozens of motorized trays and is software-driven
relying on a Windows 98 PC, that was new to me. And to be clear, this
isn't quite as advanced as it may first seem. Because while it does have
dozens of these motorized trays, it can't actually read any of the discs from the tower itself. You have to insert the
disc into the PC first, and then get like a table of contents and it'll create a database, and then store them in the tower. It will show all of this in
detail once we get it set up. But yeah, all that to say that the actual tower
here doesn't read things. As opposed to big beasts like
this Sony VAIO product here, the VGP-XL1B, which this
is a 200 disc changer and it's fully motorized
with a crazy tray inside, and it does let you actually read and write all through here. And it's way more involved, it's from later on too, I think 2005, 2006. And while it is also software controlled, it is intended as a part of a larger home multimedia PC from Sony, the VGX-XL1, so it's why you don't
see much going on here. You can't really do a lot without connecting it up to a system. If you'd like to see more about this, then do check out the wonderful "Cathode Ray Dude" video
about a variant of this one and a number of other
disc changer products. That's pretty much the main reason I haven't covered this Sony one yet, even though it is slightly different than the one shown there, but still, it's a good video, look at it. Back to looking at this KDS tower though, and I was doing a little
bit of research on it and noticed that in 2002
there were like half a dozen press releases for the same product, just worded in different
ways, which is kind of unusual and I was wondering why. Well, the original announcement
was the previous year and that was on September 11th, 2001. So, yeah, I think there might have been some other headlines taking
precedence in the press that day. And I kind of don't blame 'em for trying again next year
to get the word out. And yeah, this is the same KDS company that was pretty well known at the time for releasing computer
monitors, CRTs and LCDs, as well as a bunch of related peripherals, some laptops like their ThinNote line. And also, especially if you've
seen previous LGR episodes, they were a co-conspirator
in creating eMachines along with TriGem, another
South Korean company. And yeah, even though
there's USA in the name, KDS USA was really just the US
branch of Korea Data Systems. So, again, see that eMachines
video I did a while back if you'd like to know a little bit more about that whole deal. But yeah, in terms of where
this individual one came from, it looks like it was shipped to the Washington Park Senior high school in Racine, Wisconsin. And I can certainly see this
being useful in a school, especially like a school library, considering you can connect up to 127 of these things using
USB hubs, apparently. And if that's true and
there's 75 in each of 'em, that's 9,525 discs. That would be the most
ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Whatever though, 75 is plenty for me, I just wanna see this thing in action. And get it unboxed and, well yeah, just experience this whole silliness. Time to get this sucker opened up. [knife slicing] Might this be new old stock? 'Cause this does not look
like it's been gone through. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that looks sealed. [accessories clunk down] Yeah, that looks like a
really weird PC tower. How odd, man. Got a 12 volt, 2.1 amp power supply here by Technics. Interesting. Ooh, that is a very harsh
chemically electronic smell. Standard USB cable here. A number of CDs here it looks like, but this is just the one
that was on the very top. "Compact Disc Organizer,
disc archiving simplified" for Windows 98SE
through XP, version four. We got a warranty information card here. Let's see, "what type of
discs do you plan to store in the CD organizer?" Audio, DVDs, games,
software, data, MP3, or other? Definitely other... you know. And then– Wow, okay, big ol' fold-out, oh, quick start guide. I just don't like these, they're just always too
big, cumbersome. [large papery sigh] Anyway. That's for all the
software and here you set it up! Unpack it, plug it in, load the software, use it. That's pretty quick. Oh, interesting. So this is a later one, I was wondering when they said 4.0 this seemed like a later version and, yeah, 2003 is when
this particular bundle or kit was sold. I do have a message in here
from Flo who donated this. I don't actually know if I read this or noticed it was in there
when I did the unboxing. "My husband and I found the CD organizer while thrift store shopping in
Wisconsin on vacation there." You know what, that makes
sense with the sticker. "He also saw the address label in the box and that was a school he went to." That's interesting so, yeah, I guess originally from Wisconsin as well. And that explains the other CDs, there are a couple of games they had from when they were growing up in Germany, so let's see what these are. Oh this is is not that! Interactive CD-ROM: "How To Computers". Eight hours introduction
to personal computer stuff. Wow, I'm sure that is delightful. Here we go, so... I guess
this is called "Bi-Fi Roll", "Bih-Fee Roll"? Yeah, R2-D2, Some weird weirdness,
man. "Action in Hollywood." Wow, yeah, this is like a
homemade floppy disk case, this is apparently a shareware game. All right, so this thing itself, I am feeling better about
it hopefully working since it doesn't appear to
have been done very much with. I don't know if this is an original seal. It feels like it is, they're often much less
quality feeling than this if it's a reseal, but who knows? [plastic tearing, crinkling] Convenient little carrying handle there and, yeah, this is not very heavy at all. I'd guess maybe 10 pounds at most. Wow, yeah, that is it. On the back: KDS, Korea
Data Systems CD Organizer, the CDM-751. USB and power there, and that is all. What a nifty system.
Maybe, I guess we'll see. [buttons thunking] Yeah, it's about what I
thought those would feel like. Not great, but perfectly serviceable. I love all those individual LEDs, oh man. Definitely does not look used whatsoever. [power cable clattering] Ooh.
[tower whirs to life] Sounds like a bonkers
flatbed scanner or something. In terms of the actual
operation of all this... I mean, it says some things here but this doesn't really
go into full detail. Hopefully there's an
actual manual in the CD. Guess we'll find out. We'll just plug it into a Windows 98 PC, probably the Megaluminum Monster and just see what happens. Uh yeah, I'm just...
[tray ejects] Auuggh! Okay... I was wondering if you
could just do stuff, so that's that. Okay, what did that do? [tower whirs, tray opens] Interesting, there's no
display or any way to know what anything's doing here, I just pressed the number three and it went to like the fourth one. Does this very top one
just not open, maybe? Let's do 33. [tower noises continue] Oh, this is neat. [laughing] Okay, well let's see what happens when we get some software going. [jazz music fades] [Windows Me startup sound plays] All right, well I've got the
Megaluminum Monster going here with Windows Millennium Edition, 'cause I don't actually know where my SD card for Windows 98 went. It's, yeah, it's over there somewhere. But anyway, Me is perfectly
suitable for this as well, being from 2001-ish. So yeah, lemme go ahead and get the CD organizer software going, and this installed very easily, very quickly using the
CD that it came with. And, again, being a later version updated, it's all ready to go without having to download
any updates ourself. And, yeah, you saw that little
scan that it did right there. I'm not exactly sure what that's doing 'cause, yeah, there's no sound, no activity happening over here, maybe it's just scanning the database but at the moment there is
nothing in the database. I haven't done anything with this yet, but you can see we do have a display here or a readout of what
could be in our tower, all 75 potential discs worth. So from here, really
the only thing to do is to get some discs in the database. So you hit this new disc thing here, we can choose our tray
we want the disc to be in and then our disc type, so audio, CD, MP3, data,
VCD, DVD, games, or software. And you can put title, description
and other kind of stuff, but while you can do all that manually, why would you do that? Let's do the scan disc option, and then this will have us
select one of our optical drives. Let's do the physical
D: drive here and there and let's just scan the disc
that it came with, why not? [machine whirring] "Generating digest." And yeah, there we go. It has just looked at whatever is on there in terms of the file and folder structure, and given it the title which is just whatever
the CD is labeled as in Explorer here and, yeah, that's that. But I'm gonna label it something else. [keyboard keys clacking] All right, there we go. And since it is a data disc
we can save it that way, it detected it as that but we can choose as
software if we want to. I think the only thing
that that changes is really how it's labeled
in the database itself, otherwise it's still
scanning all this stuff and you're gonna be able to search things. And once we verify all
that, we just hit okay and yeah, it ejects the CD-ROM. And also ejects the tray that
we chose in the software. And now that is where
we do our storage, so... [tray closes, Clint chuckles to himself just because] That's all that is, that's
pretty much what this does! The number one lights up right there and we should have, yeah, CD organizer thingie, "status: in." It's got the files and some
things that it detected. You can eject it, you can insert others, you can do this lend out thing which is like a library
kinda system built in there. Who you're lending it out to,
when they should return it, the borrower's name,
phone number and address. Like, if you wanted to do a
library system on here, you can. But that seems like kind of an extensive, overly pretentious thing
to do to your friends if you're just letting
them borrow your discs, but maybe it was meant
for actual libraries. And you can also switch the trays, so like, no, I want that
in tray number 10 actually. Okay, there you go. So I'll take that out of there. These are very flimsy by the way, I feel weird touching them at all... And then it moves down. There we go. Amazing. Actually it's pretty cool. It does actually have
a manual in PDF form, I'm happy to see. It actually weighs 12.3
pounds or 5.6 kilograms, so a little more than I thought but still kind of
lightweight for its size, especially compared to a tower PC. But yeah, it's so straightforward, I haven't really found much need or found much information
that I needed in here that I couldn't already figure out just by messing around with it, because it's just the
most simple of databases, and the real selling point is that integration of everything. It does what it needs to through here and it does a lot of it
automatically, which is quite nice. You can also print out your disc database, or the number of discs
that you have on loan and really be a stickler for whoever has your discs borrowed. Mm y'know I don't have a printer though, but you know why I don't have one! It can select passwords and
multiple users for whatever, it's fine, we've pretty much seen the majority of what it can do. Except for the search
functionality, we'll get to that. We'll put a lot more
discs here in a second, but the only other thing that's kind of cool that it can do is get CD information from the internet. So I don't know that's searching
Gracenote or something, it is some big CD database
for audio CDs in particular, which I always used to use a ton whenever ripping CDs using Nero
Burning ROM back in the day. And I think those servers are still up. I don't know about the
ones that this one uses, but some of those servers are. Unfortunately this is not
connected to the internet, I don't even think I have
an ethernet card in there. Nope, don't. I should definitely put one of
those on here at some point, that'd be fun to just mess around with some networking things, but I typically don't do
too much networking anyway. Let's grab a bunch of CDs,
DVD, games, and software. It's just fun to do that, opening and closing that
through the software. And of course you can do
it through here as well, but with no display you just have to remember what you're typing in so we can press, what it
is, number 10, one zero. Eh, you can do that. But again, you don't really
wanna do that too much because then you can throw
off what this is over here, 'cause I don't think
it's gonna be able to, like, if we just open this up and take the disc outta
there, will it know? [machine whirring] I don't know. Oh, okay! So, it did actually detect that something was taken out, so it's doing something over here in terms of detecting discs. So if I open number 15, I put a different CD in
there, just "SimCity 2000". Okay, and then I'm gonna open number five... [machine whirring] ...and put this one back in. Let's try that "scan tower" again. Okay. Okay, so, and those are both lit up so I don't really know what
it's doing in terms of, it's not reading the
contents of the disc right? But I guess it just has
some sort of detector to know that there is a disc in there. Unfortunately I can't choose
a previously scanned disc, so it just gives me the
option to do it again there. Yeah, it's both smart and
dumb at the same time. That is a fascinating device, fascinating in its limitations. Anyway, yeah, let's go pick some CDs. All right, let's pick, I don't know, 15 or so discs from here and elsewhere. Certainly an eclectic selection in here. By and large, these are mostly the titles that I just have loose. I mean a lot of these
I have boxes for as well but yeah, there's some real oddities. All right, I picked a
handful from that shelf, so I've got "Skunny
Kart", "Multimedia Cats", "Bible Sleuth", the PC
port of "Twisted Metal 2" for 3Dfx cards, "Hackers Kronicklez: The Guide to the
Underground for Windows 95," the PC port of "Super 3D Noahs Ark", and the DVD-ROM PC
edition of "Pier Solar". And down in the basement,
excuse the A/C noises, but I also have a ton of just audio CDs and random DVDs and things, and all kinds of different cases. Not organized at all. I just wanted to include the
"How To Computers" CD-ROM that was bundled with the tower here. So for some audio CDs I've got, let's see, "Leftfield - Rhythm & Stealth", "DJ Skillspinz - Reintroduction of the DJ", "Trancemaster 3006", Three-6
Mafia's "Mystic Stylez", Gravity Kills self-titled album, Circuit City "Music Gift
Certificate" compilation, and I figured I'd put an MP3 CD in here so this is Dark Duck Record's "Drone Download Project - Year 1" from 2003. And so, yeah, this is just
a compilation of files. MP3s written in data format. And then for a DVD, I don't actually have too many DVD movies I mostly collect laserdisc, but I do have the complete collection of the "Viper" TV show on DVD.
R.I.P. James McCaffrey. So we'll put one of
those in there as well. Yeah, quite the selection. Of course, this begs the question, what do you do with all your cases after you get them in the tower? I don't know, who needs those? That seems like quite the
oversight as a collector. I still gotta put 'em somewhere. [laid-back jazzy interlude] All right, well that was a
simultaneously monotonous and somehow satisfying process of going through and putting in every individual disc and its information, except for the audio CDs, that was a pain. But yeah, I put them in
a kind of a haphazard scattered order, skipping
over a lot of them just 'cause I wanted to see
all the different lights light up in different ways instead of all clumped up at once, which is what it wanted to do. It wanted to do them in
order from one to 75, which I guess I can understand but I didn't want to do that! So what you get here is this overview of the entire tower by default, which shows all the empty spots, or you can just go into all discs and yeah, condenses everything down and has individual little
icons for each type of disc. And that seems to be the entire reason that it has this disc type selector, it doesn't seem to affect anything else. Yeah, we got software discs, game discs, data discs, audio, MP3
discs, one of those, a DVD, I added "SimCity 2000" in here 'cause I wanted one more thing
down there near the bottom. I like the lights, okay?
[LED-infused chuckle] And it's quite nice in terms of the way that it goes through and gets that entire
structure of what's on there. I mean, it's not very helpful in the case of a DVD for instance, it's like, "Well, yeah it's
got DVD files, whoop-dee-doo." But in the case of this one, like this "Drone Download Project", all those MP3s, things like
this "Hackers Kronicklez" here which has all of these fascinating folders full of things to mess around with. Obviously if it's not labeled in any way that's really easily searchable, like all these HTML files. It's not very helpful but, yeah, something like "Skunny Kart" here and it's got a whole bunch of different games on there,
actually, beyond just "Kart", so if you're looking for "Save our Pizzas" you can just type in pizza and it would find it,
presumably, so let's try that. Let's just type in [keyboard keys clacking] 'pizza' across all discs, all towers. And there we go, it found
all the "Skunny Kart" or Skunny Pizza things on
the "Skunny Kart" disc, and also something in the
"Hacker's Kronicklez", some kind of a script. And you just double
click that and it's like, "Okay, I wanna see what that is." So you could take the CD out
and put it in your computer, and then you could eject
the CD-ROM and do that. But, yeah. [satisfied chuckle] It's a neat solution. Not without its quirks though, especially when it comes to audio CDs, and it would be so much better
if I was able to go online and just put in all the information, 'cause otherwise you're left
doing it one track at a time. So that's unfortunate, but
that's just a side effect of not having ethernet
on this particular setup. So yeah, it's just nice to... Oh, those flimsy things, it
feel like they're gonna break. It's so easy to accidentally do that. But yeah, the nice ability
to just click on something and, boom, there it is. Ah you know, it's storage. Again, I don't know
where you're supposed to put all your jewel cases and things, just forget about those...
[chuckles in outta sight, outta mind] But as a storage device,
especially chained together with however many, 100-whatever of 'em that you can daisy chain. That's a pretty neat solution, especially for libraries or institutions or school, or whatever, like this one came from originally. I didn't have to go
retrieve a case or anything, I know that "How To Computers" is in here so I can go ahead and get that going. I've always wondered "How To Computers". - Hello and welcome to
this training course, how to make computers work for you. These days anyone can do it. You don't need to be in computers
or be technically minded at all. Computers just help you do
certain things faster and better. - All right. - This course has three main sections. - I wasn't expecting the
Englishness, but that's cool. - By taking time now to find out about some of the basic facts, you'll end up being more confident. - Right. - The first important thing
to note about the monitor is whether the screen
is color or monochrome. - Oh, this is great. - We've come to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the largest wildlife
conservation charity in Europe, to see how computers actually help people to run their business more effectively. While the RSPB is a charity, of course, but hardly the tweeds and
green woolies brigade. - Wot?! [laughing] It's interesting, how it's putting up these still photos over here and the FMV is that tiny little window, I guess, for when was this made? Oh, 1993. It's older than I thought. I mean, it does say that a 386sx is the minimum processor, Windows 3.1. Yeah, this is fascinating. [laughing] I wonder if you can just... Yeah, there you go. - This guide will introduce you to the way a spreadsheet works, and give you a feel for the
sorts of tasks it can help with. Make your first selection
from the menu now. - Oh, DTP! [keyboard keys clacking] - Welcome to Desktop Publishing.
- Oh. - Throughout this guide we'll refer to this application as DTP. So to find out how DTP can work- - Not disturbing tha peace, all right! Well, so one more thing here, I really want to see if we can get inside and see the mechanism doing its thing. I don't know how easy it is to get into, but there's a couple screws on the back. So if that's all it is,
that would be great. [screwdriver whirring] Okay, so there's like little clips. [plastic snapping] Ooh. I think it'll come off though. It's just kind of iffy. [plastic clunking] Aha! Actually don't think I broke anything. Well, would you look at this. We have a nice toothy rubber belt. And this whole mechanism
with the motor on it to push the trays in and out. Yeah, that one at the top there controlling the up and down. [light laugh of mechanical admiration] That's pretty neat, I wanna see it in action now, if we can get it powered on with it open. [unsheathed tower mechanisms whirring] Okay, I guess that is its home position down there at number 75-ish,
or maybe one below it. And yeah, I was wondering about that, it looked like the top tray and the very bottom tray were never opened and yeah, they're not even
populated with a sliding tray, but there is a slot for them. They're just empty. Yeah, that's about all I can see from here without really taking it apart further, so I don't have any ideas of
what it might be doing exactly. I'm sure you'll let me
know in the comments. A neat solution indeed. [buttons clicking]
[machine whirring] Yeah.
[machine whirring] The rest is pretty much
software, I suppose. Thanks again to Flo, and
her husband actually, for sending this over along with the lovely bits of software. This is just a really interesting setup I had no idea existed. Like I said earlier, it's just amusing in how not complicated it is and yet intelligent in terms of, or "useful" I guess, in
terms of the software. It's nice to have a database like this. For somebody I'm sure, it's nothing I would ever use
myself outside of a video. But you know what? It's just cool that it's here and in such lovely
working condition as this, and I'm just happy that it exists and I hope that you enjoyed
taking a look at it with me. And if this is something
that you've ever used, either at home or at
some kind of workplace or institution or something, then yeah, leave your
experiences in the comments. Or if there's other kind of
intelligent-ish disc organizers that you've used yeah, I'd be curious
about some of those too. And if you're interested in more LGR, there is always more of that in the works on this
channel, so stay tuned. And as always, thank you for watching.
