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If you have an old PC, don't assume that it knows about double-endedness. It might be a one-way trip.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
The CD-recording syndrome: How 'one-ended' technology can catch us unaware


May 8, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   This is a true story. Years ago, before video was a household word, my sister bought one of those things the neighbors were talking about, a "VCR or whatever," as she said later, and started renting tapes to play on her new machine.
   One day she wasn't able to get to the video store and started lamenting her bad luck. The kids were especially unhappy because their favorite show was on at 7 o'clock and they all had to go to a school play.
   "No problem," I said to her. "You can just record the show and play it back later."
   I'm not making this up. Her eyes brightened and a big smile spread over her face.
   "C'mon," she said, "you've always been a practical joker. You don't expect me to believe these things can RECORD, too, do you?"
   End of story. After heading out to buy some blank tapes, I sat her down and gave her a 10-minute course in VCR 101. Or maybe I was just catching her up on life in the '70s, the decade when everything we thought we knew about life started to change.
   I'm reminded of my sister's surprise every time I get a certain kind of letter asking for help. It usually runs something like this:
   "Dear Al, I have a PC I've been using successfully since the mid-'90s. I've been trying to make a CD recording just like you advised doing in your column the other day. But when I put a recordable CD in the drive I get an error message, and when my nephew came over to help me he wasn't even able to find my CD recording software. Can you help?"
   Alas, in most cases like this, there's not much I can do. I'd love to be able to help, but I've found that most of the readers who are trying to get their old PCs to burn CDs will never be able to do so. The reason? They're trying to get their CD drives to record, but they can't; their PCs don't have CD burners.
   I don't blame them. They're not responsible for the curious way CD technology developed. In fact, I sympathize with readers who assume that all CD drives are CD recorders. Why shouldn't they be? Nothing in our culture supports the idea that important technologies should be one-ended.
   A phone rings and you pick it up. You know that doing so lets you listen to the voice coming out of the phone. That's just one end of the process. The other is your voice. You can talk into the phone, and your voice comes out the other side.
   That's the way everything like that should work.
   But CDs started out as a kind of trial run. Nobody at Sony and Phillips, the companies that developed the CD, foresaw the way the compact disk would take over as the standard storage method for computers. Those engineers of the 1970s saw instead a future filled with audio CDs -- they expected them to take over from vinyl records and tape cassettes, which they did indeed -- but they had no way of knowing that optical disks would give the magnetic floppy disk the heave-ho so quickly.
   At least the floppy was able to record and "play back." But the forlorn floppy is a sad story indeed. Apple no longer includes floppy disk drives with its computers (you can get one separately if you really need it), and many Windows PC makers are doing the same thing. The problem is simply a question of capacity. Floppy disks hold a little less than 1 1/2 megabytes, a space so meager that a single MP3 song downloaded off the Internet would fill it up.
   CDs, by contrast, hold 650 megabytes, enough to store a dozen great American novels or 200 MP3 songs.
   But capacity like that came at a price. Everybody knows that a floppy disk is one of those double-ended things. You can put stuff on; you can take stuff off. You speak into the phone, and it speaks back to you. It's easy to grasp.
   But for years, computers came with CD drives that were single-ended. You had to be quick on the uptake before the sales clerk walked away to make sure you got a computer that could put something onto CDs in addition to taking something off. You were supposed to know this kind of thing in advance.
   Those days are almost over. All new Windows PCs and all new Apple Macintosh computers come with drives that can record CDs as well as play them back. Older PCs that don't have CD-recording capability are still around, but eventually they'll take their single-endedness to computer heaven.
   Until then, if you have an old PC, don't assume that it knows about double-endedness. It might be a one-way trip.