When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).
When I was 15 I bought a CD burner for my PC. This was circa 1999 and Napster. It cost about $250 (which is a little over $500 in 2026) and it had to be installed and in a more complex fashion beyond plug USB and let’s drivers auto install. I was selling custom CDs for $5 with case inserts and paid off the burner in about a month. Then someone snitched on me in school and eventually burners started becoming standard on all new machines
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).