Re: Compact Discs

I never really gained an appreciation for the compact disc; cassette tape always seemed far superior. Tape was more durable. I had to take special care not to get fingerprints on the precious CDs. Unlike CDs, tape and the requisite hardware was small enough to fit in a pocket. It was read-write from the start and insanely versatile.

There was a huge culture around home production and home duplication. I was a cassette pirate from the time I was able to press a record button. When I was a child, I loved classical music, and we had a family friend with an enormous collection of classical phonograph records. I'd go to his house every day, eat junk food, and we'd listen to great music. I'd borrow records from his collection, take them home, and copy them to tape. I also copied cassettes with a dual cassette deck. I recorded music and other broadcast programming from the radio. None of that flexibility was possible with CDs.

Sometimes cassette copying had a very human touch. When I was ten years old or so, a friend made me a copy of a movie soundtrack. At the end of the tape, he left a brief recorded message: "hope you enjoy!"

I wasn't able to produce my own CDs until the late 1990s, and doing so required a computer with a CD-R drive. Recording a CD required specialized hardware and a bit of ceremony, whereas I had several tape machines ready to record or duplicate at need.

We still have a couple of cassette decks here in the apartment. One is nearly 25 years old, and they still work. We don't have a single audio CD player. We do have an external USB CD drive, but it barely worked the last time we tried to use it.

When it came to data storage, I preferred the 3.5-inch floppy disk to the CD, for many of the same reasons. As a blind person, floppy drives had a secondary benefit: there was a very useful auditory cue to let me know that data was being read or written. That property was useful when booting Linux from a floppy, because I could get an idea of how far along I was in the boot process by listening to drive noise.

While I'm strolling down memory lane, I'll mention that I was deeply saddened when AOL started sending CDs in the mail instead of floppies. I never used AOL, but I did look forward to receiving free floppy disks from them. I rarely bought my own. On the other hand, their CDs were plastic garbage destined for the landfill.

For people with a DIY, punk, small-is-beautiful ethic, magnetic media was the superior choice. It had its own drawbacks, but all in all, I appreciated it for what it was.

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Compact Discs