Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn't actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.

This is part of why you could burn "faster", although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.

I am very, very old.

[–] nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world 38 points 4 days ago (2 children)

"Floppy disks" were 8 inches a side in my youth and went in the minicomputer

Then along came Newfangled desktop PCs with their 5.25" floppies

Tom Bombadil remembers first acorn and first rain drop

[–] DivineDev@piefed.social 9 points 4 days ago

I used those big floppy disks with some ancient hardware for running physics experiments during university in like 2015-ish, and I'm sure that exact floppy is still in use today. It's not even a small and underfunded university or anything.

[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Fun fact, in some countries the 3.5" floppies were called "stiffy disks". You know, because the outer casing was "stiff" as opposed to the floppy 5.25" disks. This discovery led to a lot of chuckling among the team I worked with when we opened a new product from one of those countries and read the manual. The instruction to "insert stiffy disk" still leads most of us to chuckling today.

[–] curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

As the owner of a CD burner so old there was no speed to note, and later upgraded to a 4x burner....

I'm also quite old it seems.

Edited to add: I bought it at a computer show. The kind that you showed up to in person and paid like $5 to get into. I also bought a used laser 128.

[–] mateofeo85@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago

Nerd alert!

[–] GreyCat@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

I am very, very old

Good job !
And thanks for the explanation.

[–] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 days ago

Godamn that's cool

[–] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

Godamn that's cool

[–] Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

Godamn that's cool.