The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press releases touting the advantages of the new technology, articles describing the whys and wherefores, but… nope. There is nothing.
And so begins a deep dive into the origins of ATAPI, through examining early drivers and their code.
Ouch… I vaguely remember the struggles we had back in the day. It was not easy to get CD-ROMs to work on DOS, and everything else with the ecosystem was also cumbersome.
Audio? The HDDs were much smaller than 700MB, so they had to “pass through” via the sound card. A special cable would come out of the CD-ROM drive to the Sound Blaster, and there was a special API to run the drive in Audio CD mode. (I was really happy to finally have command line rippers later in Linux).
Writing? Get ready to have lots of failures. Even though you could have a 12X drive and a 12X CD-R it would have major defect rates on those speeds. Better go 2x to waste them.
Today they are nothing but a memory. My final optical drive was a Blu Ray writer. I got a bunch of empty BD-Rs, but then when I did the math, it was much cheaper, and much more convenient, to just back up everything to a HDD. Even today HDDs are the best storage medium for backups for most people (tapes require at least 100TB to break even).
Are you some sort of elitist?
12X Write was for the professional studios, us poor plebs had to stick with 4x at best and even then the yield was very very low!
Did you notice that little passing mention of EIDE in the article, what a nightmare all that stuff was, I’m still dealing with some of the after-effects today?
Hard drives are good for backups, but a very poor choice for archival purposes. If you want to keep something for decades instead of years, it’s best to stick to LTO tape, or optical.
Older, second-hand tape drives and media aren’t hugely expensive. A much better choice if you need to keep the data for a long time.
The123king,
I checked LTO6 drives, but the math did not add up for the scale.
Yes, using HDDs for backup require constant transfer of data. Yet, since I would be upgrading storage every 2-3 years anyway, it is not an issue in practice. (But some kind of check-summing and self repair is a definite must).
I got my first PC with a CD-ROM drive by the mid 90’s, when it became a pretty standard piece of equipment.
The Matsushita CD-ROM drive was plugged into a SoundBlaster clone, and required some strange driver chaining in DOS : the CD-ROM driver was an EXE file which had to be loaded from AUTOEXEC.BAT, only after the soundblaster initialization tool was run (but before MSCDEX of course!).
I remember failing to install OS/2 because of this : I was able to bootstrap the installer, but it hanged or failed sometime in the process, probably because it couldn’t access to the CD drive once it switched to native mode.
Same problem again when I tried to install some Linux distribution (Red Hat Linux probably) a few months later.
I think I even tried to install BeOS 5.
So that was it, my CD-ROM drive was some proprietary thing, and I couldn’t use it with anything but DOS/Windows.
I kept reading that this specific model was supported on Linux though, so I deep dived into it… and realized the CD-ROM drive cable could actually be plugged on the mainboard.
So I did it, and it worked! The drive was actually conforming to this new ATAPI standard, and now I could use generic .SYS drivers I had found on other computers, no more crazy SoundBlaster clone dependency.
I think I actually did install my first Linux distro at home on this computer, but quickly came back to DOS/Windows until the year of Linux on the destkop would come.
I don’t remember the brand of the computer itself. I think it used a 486DX processor, Cirrus Logic graphics on VLB (probably on the mainboard), and maybe 4MB of RAM.
By this time, this was quite an upgrade from our 7-8 years old PC XT from Zenith Data Systems, with an 8MHz 8088, EGA graphics, and a 30 MB hard drive.
For OS/2, I think you were in good company, and this article is hinting at why. OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 were distributed mainly on floppy disks. OS/2 Warp 3 was distributed on CD and launched in October 1994. At that point truly standards compliant drives only existed for a couple months, plus a few months of not fully compliant drives, plus the long tail of proprietary drives. I remember when this release was reviewed commenters saying how CD driver bugs were preventing people installing it, and I remember buying a later edition (OS/2 Warp Connect, May 1995) to overcome the issues with the initial release. There was also a blue spine build between these two.
OS/2 museum suggests that one gotcha is having to explicitly indicate that the CD is an “unlisted IDE” during setup – without changing the default selection, later installations fail: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-warp-installation-pitfalls/
OS/2 Warp 3.0 shipped on floppies and (later?) CD-ROM. I have the floppy version in storage, all 30-odd floppies.
Was a lot of “fun” installing that on a 486DX4/133 back in the day, especially when floppy 23 started making that “ka-thunk, ka-thunk” noise and you start worrying about a dead sector. Managed to get the 56K WinModem working in Windows 3.1 running via Win-OS2, and pass the networking connection through to the OS/2 web browser. Learned a lot from that system (ran Windows 3.11, OS/2, Win95, Win98, and few versions of RedHat Linux and FreeBSD on it. Due to the WinModem, though, it mostly ran Windows while in university, except the one year I lived in dorms and had a 10 Mbps Ethernet connection.
Hmm, I didn’t know it shipped on floppies. I know it’s possible to create floppies from the CD, which is what I did with the initial build. The CD ended up storing the entire operating system multiple times in different formats.
As far as reminiscing about installing from floppies, I did that with NT 3.1 which was larger than OS/2 of its time. Being 1993 the CD situation was worse than 1994 – there are no ATAPI drivers for NT 3.1, so using floppies was almost required. NT 3.5 in 1994 added support for ATAPI.
I used OS/2 for Windows (aka 2.1) back in its day, which was substantially smaller by not bundling Win-OS/2. I don’t remember the floppy count, but smaller than NT. Removing Windows not only made it smaller, but frankly, it worked better, because it could append itself to an existing Windows install, and the resulting Windows install could run either under DOS or OS/2.
Yes, I had one of those too in a packard bell I obtained for free in the mid 2000’s, I feel really dumb now, I didn’t realize it could have worked if it was plugged into the motherboard. I have no idea if it had such a port. I had intended it to be a linux or freebsd file server, but just ended up using it as a dumb windows 3.1 box for dos games due to the cdrom issues.
ATAPI was basically SCSI packets under the hood, using the ATA registers and commands. SATA is basically serial SCSI, etc.
Ahhh 90s CD drives…boy did those make us buttloads of money back in the day at the shop thanks to being so fricking buggy and easy to bork! Between driver bugs, Windows bugs, oh and let us not forget 90s gaming DRM that could actually burn up the drive if you had a burner, it made us a ton of money but boy were they a PITA and I don’t miss trying to get that junk working well on Win 9X, ugh.
It seems to me that’s really difficult to find articles about things happened more than 20 years ago on internet.
Heh, I think the Internet has a bit of an “event horizon” where it became mainstream, and anything from even slightly before that date is just nonexistent. My first experience with the Internet was trying to use it in 1996 to find information about WLO (Windows Libraries for OS/2), which started life around 1991, and as far the Internet is concerned, doesn’t exist.