At the time, my father decided to buy a Ricoh MP7060S (6x/4x/24x) with a bundled Adaptec SCSI card for our AMD K6-2 300MHz system with a Fujitsu 5.2GB hard disk, but I said that it would probably be preferable to go for the MP7060A ATAPI/IDE model instead. It would still be a few years before I began my CD-writing journey.īy the time 1997 rolled around, the speed of CD-RW drives reached 6x and the price fell to an affordable AU$380. For a school, the cost was easily justified as students made a regular habit of scratching up the original CDs and caddy-based drives had fallen out of fashion.

Initial “burners” were around $1,500 or so and burned at a leisurely 1x or 2x – I remember our primary school were among the first to have an external SCSI unit paired with some very dark green Sony 63-minute CD-Rs. In the mid 90s, however, CD writers became cost effective for home users which led to an explosion in both legal and illegal backups of CD-ROMs, audio CDs and video CDs. The biggest disadvantage, however, was the fact it was read-only memory.

The utility of the CD-ROM was the ability to deliver a lot of content (including multimedia content) at a low cost to end users at a time when computer hard drives ranged from a fraction of the capacity of a CD (several hundred megabytes) up to a handful of gigabytes. There was a time when 650MB or even 700MB was a “lot” of data.

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