Chapter 9
Going Round and Around:
CD and DVD Drives
In This Chapter
Listening for the music of the discs
Bringing together laptops and CDs
Putting the pedal to the metal: measuring speed and size
Showing now on the little screen: DVDs
Coping with a good CD or DVD gone bad
T
here is a horse-and-cart relationship between some of the more impor-
tant components of laptop computers and more broadly based consumer
products such as televisions, home audio systems, and video and digital
cameras. Sometimes the horse comes first, and sometimes the cart.When it comes to CDs and DVDs, although the technology is a natural fit for
computers, both actually arose from consumer applications. Compact discs
(they spell it with a cas a vestige of the European origins of the standard)
were developed as the digital replacement to stacks of wax: Those of us who
are old enough to call collections of music albumshappily remember the
arrival of the CD. DVDs were first envisioned as a replacement for the analog
videocassette for VCRs.The Music Came First ..................................................................................
Both CDs and DVDs are considered optical drivessince information is read in
the form of pulses of reflected light rather than as magnetic dots. CDs were
introduced to the market in 1982, just about a year after the first personal
computers began arriving in offices and homes. The storage device on the
original IBM PC was a cassette audio recorder and a clunky and slow 180K
floppy disk. Meanwhile, the first CD audio players worked with discs holding
as much as 600MB of data.