CD Burners

CD recorders started as professional equipment — $10,000 to $12,000 in the early 1990s — until Hewlett-Packard's 4020i shipped in September 1995 at $995, the first burner under a thousand dollars. By decade's end, IDE CD-R drives were cheap enough for regular home computers, and many teenagers nervously opened their tower cases to install one themselves. A blank CD-R held 650 MB for 74 minutes of audio (later upgraded to 700 MB and 80 minutes), early drives wrote at 2x or 4x speed, and the burn process was a held-breath ritual: if your PC's data buffer ran dry mid-burn — often because you dared to keep using the computer — the disc became a worthless coaster, a word every burner owner knew well.

The software defined the experience. Nero Burning ROM, released by German company Ahead Software in 1997 (a pun on Emperor Nero burning Rome), and Adaptec's Easy CD Creator became the household names; Adaptec spun off its software division as Roxio in 2001. Later drives added buffer-underrun protection technologies like BurnProof and SafeBurn that made the process safer, and speeds climbed toward 52x as the decade progressed. The PC burner boom was fueled by Napster downloads and Winamp playlists: teenagers and young adults burned personalized mix CDs for road trips, carefully labeling each disc with Sharpie, stashing spindles of blank CD-Rs from office-supply stores, and making backup copies of games and software.

The golden age ran from roughly 1999 to 2005 — the window when the burner was the way music moved between people who'd outgrown the record store. USB sticks, the iPod, and streaming ended it, and most laptops eventually dropped the optical drive entirely, leaving only the shoeboxes of Sharpie-labeled discs to prove any of it happened.