This era reminds me of the time that my grandmother (in same house) got a new Compaq with a CD burner. It was running windows ME. My dumb ass thought that because a had disk drive could be mounted as a volume over the network, a burner could too. Turns out you can sort-of network mount a CD drive but its not usable. The days and hours I wasted on this project, including convincing my mom to take me to Fry's in Burbank to get a Netgear hub (not switch!) to glue everything together.

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tracker1 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Back when Fry's Electronics actually had hardware in stock. The last time I tried to get something at the North Phoenix location, it was pitiful and I couldn't find what I needed. I hadn't been there for years and wound up having to wait 2 days for Amazon anyway.

FWIW, I haven't been to the Phoenix Microcenter yet, mostly in that I'm afraid of how much I might otherwise spend there.

	▲	flyinghamster 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Dave's site has an article on Fry's: https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-frys-electronics/ They only had one in Illinois, about seven miles or so from Micro Center, and it was one of the earliest to fold. Once upon a time, I had brick-and-mortar Tiger Direct, Micro Center, and Fry's stores all within an hour's drive. Micro Center is the last one standing.
	▲	15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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stackghost 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined.

A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend and life was good.

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creaturemachine 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.

	▲	ssl-3 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I saw my friends doing that and stayed out of that game completely until Plextor released their first 8x burner -- the PR-820. By then, it was all pretty well sorted despite that burner having no underrun protection. The IBM Ultrastar 9ES drives kept it fed very well on that otherwise quite slow Slackware box. Burn a CD, compile a kernel, and browse the web while watching some VCD rip of a music video in one corner of the screen? No problem.

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bitwize 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Last year's birthday present from me to my wife was a mix CD. I attempted to recreate Cereal Killer's Greatest Zukes Album, briefly mentioned in Hackers (1995): "All great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit!" My criterion was that the artists featured had to have died of a drug or alcohol overdose before September of 1995 (when Hackers was released), and four of the tracks had to be by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cass Eliot, and the Blues Brothers (satisfying the Belushi requirement), who are named in the film.

She still listens to it when working.

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HoldOnAMinute 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That Fry's is forever memorialized in the 2022 movie Nope