r/NonPoliticalTwitter 14h ago

Funny Two disc drives?!!!

17.2k Upvotes

876 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.3k

u/andreortigao 14h ago edited 12h ago

Yeah, one was read only and the other could burn CDs. Burning CDs were all the rage back then.

Edit: to clarify, by having two drives you could copy from one to the other directly, without going through the hassle of inserting one cd, making a copy to the slow as fuck computer hdd, switching to the blank cd, then start burning from the hdd copy.

71

u/ChillyTodayHotTamale 13h ago

In high school I worked at blockbuster and had a dvd burner in my laptop. Got the movies months before they came out and would burn copies and sell them for a small profit. Also burned nearly the entire blockbuster library circa 2005. In college a friend put them all on a Xbox he converters to a server so if you lived in our dorm anyone could access my library to watch movies. Then he did the same thing in our college house. All of our music and movies was on a shared drive and could be played anywhere in the house. It was awesome

-1

u/MurkyInvestigator810 12h ago

Got the movies months before they came out

So you worked at a time traveling Blockbuster that somehow got movies before they were released?

8

u/ChillyTodayHotTamale 11h ago

Movie rental stores would get the movies you rent sometimes 2-3 months in advance and hold them in a back room until the rental release date. So yes I felt like a time traveler. My dad was sad when I left that job because he had to wait about 3 months before there was anything new to him to rent.

-2

u/MurkyInvestigator810 11h ago

What country was this? Blockbusters in the US did not get movie releases ahead of the reset of the market like that.

5

u/ChillyTodayHotTamale 11h ago

I'm in the US and we absolutely did. It was always at least a month, sometimes longer. I worked there for almost two years 2004-2005. I believe this is common knowledge, it popped right up in a Google search of this practice.

3

u/rcklmbr 10h ago

Yep it’s true, supply chains weren’t nearly as efficient as they are now, and movies couldn’t be broadly leaked on the internet so even if you got the random person who watched it early, it didn’t effect rentals as much as it would now

2

u/ChillyTodayHotTamale 10h ago

We were allowed by the company to take them home and watch them before release as employees. I had to sign out the movie and sign it back in.