A mildly annoying trend over recent years has been for USB hardware devices to expose a CD-ROM drive containing their drivers for Windows users. Of course there’s no real CD in there, instead… ...

But as originally specified, one CD-ROM could store 550 MB of data, a mind-melting capacity in the mid-1980s, when even a 20 MB hard drive felt sinfully luxurious and floppies maxed out at 1.2 MB.

[Kyle] wanted to try something new. A Persistence of Vision Clock using a CD-ROM drive. We have covered lots of POV Clocks that make use of hard drives, but we think this is the first time we have … ...

Still, the CD-ROM drive itself wouldn't spin up, and a system check mode failed on the "CD I/F" test. The system was sending commands to the CD drive but not receiving any responses back.

“By the early 1990s, there was a large end-user community using CD-ROM technology proving wide access to electronic resources,” he writes. During the boom of CD-ROM databases in libraries, Bobinski ...