I still feel awe at the compact disc. When I was a teenager in the mid – late 90s, scanning microscopic pits with a freaking laser beam, and storing hundreds of megabytes on a storage medium, still seemed like a big deal, real cutting edge stuff. And yet that format had been invented well over a decade before.
I’m also surprised that if the CD was already invented by the early 1980s and widely sold commercially for music, it took until the early 1990s for applications in computing with CD-ROM. Was the bottleneck here CPUs, RAM, and graphics cards, which would not have been able to handle the amount of data that a CD-ROM could store?
I’m also surprised that if the CD was already invented by the early 1980s and widely sold commercially for music, it took until the early 1990s for applications in computing with CD-ROM. Was the bottleneck here CPUs, RAM, and graphics cards, which would not have been able to handle the amount of data that a CD-ROM could store?