When did you lose your optical viginity?

My first PC (a 386) didn't even have one...but then I inherited a Packard Bell P75 from my boyfriend in the late 90s, which had a 2x CD-ROM in it (plugged into a socket on the soundcard).

My first CD burner was a Philips CDD3610 shortly after I ditched the P75...thought it was the mutt's nuts, at 2x with no buffer underrun tech.

Then I discovered the wonderful world of Plextor CDRWs, and it was all downhill from there

Anyone else?

A Sony CDU-something, maybe 4x.
My first burner? A crappy, bulk 8x Samsung SW-208F with no buffer underrun protection (8x CD-R, 4x CD-RW, 32x CD read). Only replaced it one and half a year ago when it refused to burn MBI and CMC discs... newer drives just do it fine...

whats the point in two cd-rom?.. i know i know..
first was a goldstar 32x internal cd-rom, then we got a freecom external cd writer... which didnt work with xp, so we ended up selling it..

I meant the CD-ROM drive was 2x speed. Maybe I should edit.

Lol, i hadnt even heard of cd/dvd speed when i had my first burner. That was around 1997. It was a 52x Teac cd writer. It was very loud, but like boris the blade almost said 'the loud noise is a sign of reliability' . The next one i got was on my dad's (or mine as he never uses it), which was a toshiba, then i got a sony drx-800ul, which was a good cd burner, and average dvd burnerm which was fraught with crap as it was connected to said laptop which has underpowered usb and firewire ports. Then i heard of this site through another forum, and bought the benQ 1650, and stuck that in a pentium 3 and STILL could not burn a sl dvd at 16x, so i then got an enclosure, STILL no go, the p3 computer's hard disk was too slow and old as was the rest of that setup. So then i could only write at 8x. Then i wanted a DL burner so i got the pio 111 and put that in an enclosure, and that could write my dl dvd;s. And then a happy ending, I built my computer and have both burners in my computer burning happily at 12x to my yuden T02 The only downside is that ive got two enclosures that are just sitting doing nothing.

I think there was no 52x CD-writer’s back in 1997, unless you used a time machine.

I only just noticed that...damn, I'd have loved a 52x back then

lol, i dunno then, i suppose it might have been after the year 2000

The first optical drive was in my P4 90 from gateway which I bought on the first day of its release. It was a Mitsumi 4x CD-ROM. After that Sony CDU921S was my first CD-R followed by 2x CDU921S-PR (special modified edition of CDU948S) Plextors(PX-R820T/PX-W1210TS) and Teacs (R55S/58S) etc to NEC DVD writer and various other CD-ROM and DVD-ROM Drives.

Sound Blaster Pro with Panasonic 562 CD-ROM...
Then Plextor(TEXEL) SCSI CD ROM...
Then Panasonic SCSI CW 7502 burner...And then it all gets hazy...

AH HA!! It was the year 2003 cant believe its only been three years since i burnt my first cd, and until then i hadnt even heard of nero I was 15 then, to think that i could've been learning this stuff five years earlier than then lol


*EDIT* WTF i dont get it, ive got a 48x maxell cd that according to cd.dvd speed is dated at 1997, ok then Jan, no 52x, but certainly 42x and in that case, my TEAC was from 1997

Early 90's, first puter, a Tandy (Radioshack) 386DX/66...Yoohoo!!!
No clue what it had for a cd-rom drive... lol.

@Arachne, I was hoping you meant something else by "optical virginity"...

@greg - methinks the date on your rig was screwy when you burned that CD

@maineman - what, me? Never (I need a halo smiley)

I have had optical drives in my work computers since around 1992 (Sun workstations with some form of SCSI-based CD-ROM drive).

The first personal optical drive I got however, was a HP SureStore CD-Writer Plus 7200e (external) 2x CD-R/RW burner with a parallel-port interface and the ability to operate in pass-thru mode with a parallel-port printer.



This was a replacement for an external SyQuest SparQ 1.0GB removable harddrive (something like Iomega's Jazz drive but really really bad), so it wasn't really a planned buy, but what I ended up with because the SparQ drive was awful and I returned it to get the CD-Writer instead.

The price of that drive at the time here in Denmark was approximately 2400 Kr which is £220 or $400, but it served me well.

Later I got a HP CD-Writer 8100 (internal) which was twice as fast - 4x burning (without buffer under-run protection) woohoo!
I liked this drive so much that we bought two more for my dad's office.

My next optical drive purchase was a Plextor PlexWriter PX-W1610A and things were getting really fast with 16x CD-R burning and 40x reading.

lol, haha, not that screwy can someone post me to a link with some sort of history of cd burners??? i tried searching for one to no avail

what?? like the first time your eyes got laid by prOn?

LOL @ "eyes got laid by pr0n"

Now that Drage has mentioned price (I never thought to), my Philips CDD3610 cost me something like £150.

My Plex CD burner was the most expensive though, at £200.

thats unreal, 200 pounds?? pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffftttttttt. Now THAT is how you know you're a cd 'freak'

Honest to God. The Philips I got in Software Warehouse, which no longer exists. The £200 Plextor was an online buy from Simply Computers.

Anyway, Drage paid the equivalent of £220 for his, if you look

Hmm...

I believe the first optical drive I ever had was a 4x Toshiba CD-ROM drive in my 75MHz AST desktop PC.

The first writer I bought was an Acer CRW4432A (4x4x32).

@Arachne...
Riiiiiiight!!!...You know, I think of many things when the name Arachne comes to mind...all good btw, but angelic, is Not one of them...

Drat

haha, you know an image of a poll dancing version of your avatar just popped into my head LOL