Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

At the time, it was the CD-ROM that had captured the imagination of consumers and the entire publishing industry. The high-capacity optical discs enabled mass distribution of multimedia for the first ...

Replay: The battlefields of the audio visual world are littered with the corpses of dead formats, none more so than the fight to put moving images on to discs. With the exception of LaserDisc, none of ...

Meghan is an associate editor with EdTech. She enjoys coffee, cats and science fiction TV. For students attending a university in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the experience was vastly different ...

A virtual CD-ROM emulator works by allowing you to copy and run an image of a CD on your computer. The process serves as an alternative to placing a disc in your computer each time you want to use it, ...

Sometimes in the never-ending progression of technology, people take wrong turns. They pursue dead-ends they believe represent a bright future, often in spite of obvious indications to the contrary.

This article describes how to set up a virtual CD-ROM jukebox (VCDJ) using Samba and Linux. A VCDJ is a network server that provides access to the contents of a large number of CD-ROM disks, without ...

Everything fails eventually, but moving parts fail fastest of all– and optical drives seemingly more than others, at least in our experience. Even when they work, vintage drives often have trouble ...