![]() Happily, 3.5 inch floppies have a spring-loaded shield that helps protect the surface of the disk from being contaminated, but 5.25 inch disks are not so lucky. This means that the transfer of oil, dust or even flaked off particles of the disc surface itself can end up stuck to the head, creating an issue that can be difficult to resolve. Unlike CD-ROMs, the surface of a floppy disk does contact the magnetic head that reads data from it. Like with CD-ROMs, a dirty floppy disk can lead to a dirty drive, which can be a much more serious problem. This can often take a few tries, and if it doesn’t work you’ll need to dismantle the drive – a subject for another day. You put the disc in the drive, and while it tries to read it, the lens is cleaned by the brushes. These discs have brushes you moisten with fluid (typically also isopropyl alcohol). If your drive is a tray-loading CD-ROM, like in most computers and consoles like the XBOX or PS2, you may need to use a cleaning disc. Make sure it doesn’t have any colourants added (some brands do!) Gently rub the q-tip against the lens, give it a moment for the alcohol to evaporate and then try loading a clean disc again. The laser can’t read through gunk! If the drive is part of a console that has the lens in easy reach (such as the first Playstation) then you can clean it using a q-tip dampened with some isopropol (or rubbing) alcohol. Well, if some of the gunk that was on the disc ended up on your laser’s lens, you have a problem. Step two: gently rub a little dish soap over the surface of the data side with your fingers, working free any stuck gunk. Step one: run water from the faucet over the data side to remove larger grit. You can wash a CD, but you need to do it gently, so that you don’t scratch it. This situation would leave you with two outstanding issues: a dirty CD, and a non-working CD-ROM. As an increasing-number of youth-focussed titles appeared, such as educational and game software, so increased the likelihood of gumming up the lens on your CD-ROM drive with a filthy disc! In a perfect world, people would always grab CD-ROMS only by their edges, never put the data side down on the surface of a table (or a dinner plate!) and only store them inside of their jewel case, itself stored inside a hermetically-sealed vault – but this is not a perfect world. Stand-alone games also benefitted, with new titles leveraging the increased storage capacity to include character voiceovers and professionally produced video “cutscenes” which enhanced storylines and created a more immersive experience for players.Ĭould you imagine loading a game like Halo off of floppies? Thank goodness for the CD (and later the DVD)-ROM! Now, an encyclopaedia could have a wealth of colour pictures, audio and video as well as interactive features such as quizzes and games. ![]() Encyclopaedias were the first popular use for the new format – old paper-based encyclopaedias took up several volumes and thousands of pages, often had limited and/or monochrome imagery, and obviously no video! Denon partnered with Sony to introduce the first CD-ROM drive, and then Sony partnered with Philips to extend the capacity to 650MB.ĭue to its vastly increased storage capacity over floppy disks (450 1.44mb floppies!) the CD-ROM opened up a whole new world of “multimedia”-rich software, with large libraries of digitised images, full-motion video, entire collections of books, large databases and so forth. This was recognised as early as 1982 by Japanese manufacturer Denon, who developed a method of storing 553 megabytes of random-access data on a single disc. However, being a digital format, data storage was an obvious alternative use case for the CD. It met with steady success, eventually supplanting cassette and vinyl by the early 1990s. Philips partnered with Sony to develop the new disc, initially intended for digital audio storage. First demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1982, the Compact Disc was an evolution of the optical LaserDisc format created by Philips and MCA.
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