strollin wrote:
Gdetrailer wrote:
...
8088 computers introduced by IBM as the model 5150 (AKA IBM "PC" as in Personal Computer) in late 1981 would have had 8" FLOPPY drives or 5 1/4" FLOPPY DRIVES, huge difference since floppies required the head to touch the media and CDs use LASER LIGHT (hence the term of "optical" drive)..
I never saw 8" floppies used with an IBM PC but suppose it could have been possible that some company made an interface to accommodate that type of drive. 5 1/4" floppies were most commonly used with 8088 computers but the IBM PC (and XT) also had a cassette interface built-in.
CD ROM drives were first available around 1985 so it's certainly within the realm of possiblity that someone could have used a CD ROM drive with their 8088 computer.
8" floppy drives were "available" as an external drive "option" to the Model 5150. I used to service a POS/backoffice system which used IBM Model 5150. Had an external combo box which housed 8" floppy drive, full size 5 1/4" 40 MB MFM HD and a tape backup drive. The box was the same size as the 5150 PC.
Pretty darn crude and booting it up was a time consuming adventure (you could brew a cup of coffee while it counted 64K of memory)..
By the time CD rom drives made it out that PC was completely obsoleted by several processor generations (IE 286 and 386 which would have been IBM PS/2 Model 30 White switch and newer which did not have any drive bays which would accept a internal CD rom drive (standard CD rom drive size is known as 1/2 height 5 1/4" drive size) and pretty much already scrapped.
While it "might" have been "possible" it is highly doubtful since a CD rom drive back when it came out was a rather expensive option and there would have been very few software titles available.
Not to mention at that time software was rather small footprint and often was just one or a couple of floppies to install. It wouldn't make sense to put 360K, 720K or even 1.44 mb on a PRESSED CD ROM.
The cost to press a CD was extremely high due to very poor pressing quality (rejection ratio was extremely high when CDs first came out something like 1 in ten was good enough to use), so it took a long time to make pressed CDs as a means for software distribution common place and cost effective.
I would place that as doubtful, not even plausible, time has a way of smearing our recollections to a point of extreme fuzziness. I really don't think he meant 8088 but several processor generations newer, but his point was that he has been using optical drives (CD/DVD) reliably for a LONG, LONG TIME and I would echo that myself.
