Burning CD-Rs Was a Big Part of CultureĪs CD-Rs discs grew cheaper and cheaper around 2000, CD-R adoption grew rapidly. Much to the chagrin of every industry that published data on CDs, people used CD-Rs for piracy too-both in commercial counterfeit operations and also personal use, and the rapidly dropping price of CD-R media fueled that trend considerably. And only a few years after that, you could buy bulk CD-Rs in spindles for pennies a disc. CD-R drives grew faster over time too-by 2002, a 52x CD-R drive could burn an entire CD in under three minutes.Īs CD-R drives became more common, the cost of CD-R media dropped dramatically as well. Finally, in 1995, when consumers could purchase a Hewlett-Packard CD-R drive for under $995, CD-Rs began to go mainstream. The cost of CD-R authoring systems dropped dramatically, including one from Meridian for $98,000 a few months after the Topix, a system from Sony for $30,000 in 1990, and the first 5.25″ half-height CD-R drive in 1992 for $11,000 as part of a custom system. (In 1989, a typical desktop hard drive stored 20 or 40 megabytes, and a CD-ROM could hold 650 megabytes.) The Meridian CD Publisher (1989) made CD-Rs on a system the size of a washing machine. Optical Media International’s Topix CD authoring system included a complete computer setup since common desktop PCs didn’t have the storage space, software, or any of the necessary hardware to do the task.
Get it? The Cost Of CD-Rs Dropped RapidlyĪccording to some reports, the first commercial CD-R drives emerged in 1988 from Taiyo Yuden in Japan, but the earliest we’ve found, from Optical Media International, launched in 1989 and cost $150,000 (about $324K today). So instead of pits in a commercially pressed CD, CD-Rs use darkened areas of dye “burned” into the disc. Instead, you could embed a transparent chemical layer in the disc that would darken when heated with a higher-powered laser. But in the mid-1980s, scientists at Taiyo Yuden in Japan discovered that you didn’t need actual pits to diffuse the laser light. The drawback to mass-produced CDs is that the three-dimensional data layer (of pits and flat areas) is permanently stamped onto the disc and can’t be changed later. If the laser gets reflected back in a flat area, the player registers a “1.” If the laser beam hits a pit and gets dimmed or deflected, it registers as a “0.” Andy Heyward/ To read a CD, a CD player shines a laser along a spiral groove embedded in the data layer of the disc.
USING WINDOWS 10 TO BURN MUSIC TO CD SERIES
In a regular mass-produced CD, data is stored as binary data in a series of physical pits and flat areas (or a lack of pits) in a special layer on the disc.
To understand why that’s useful, you need to know how a regular CD works first. How Does a CD-R Work?Īll you fire marshals out there can calm down: While burning a CD, nothing literally gets burned (as in fire), but a chemical layer in the disc does change from the heat of the laser. In particular, the phrase “ burn an EPROM” was common before CDs came along, and the term likely extends back in technology before that. But the term “burn,” meaning “to write,” predates CD-Rs. In our search through media archives online, the term “burn a CD” first appeared around 1993, when CD-R technology started to become affordable enough for business use. An early 1993 advertisement that mentions burning a CD. But, during that time period, burning CDs was very common. With the advent of USB flash drives and the Internet, burning CDs became a less popular way to store and transfer data. The process is often called “burning” because a laser in the CD-R drive uses heat to record the data to the disc.įor about a decade from 1996 to 2005, many computers shipped with CD-R drives built-in so people could make backups of their data, share digital photos with others, create audio mix CDs, and more. To burn a CD means to write data onto a recordable compact disc (called a “CD-R” for short), with a special device called a CD burner or CD-R drive. Burning Means Writing a Recordable CD with a Laser