Cool Tech from 1982: The Compact Disc Pt3.

My Own Memories of the Silver Disc   13-Aug-26

I think it's natural to be interested in the state of technological progress, the state of the world even, at the time of one's birth. Despite such developments happening on a continuum - a curious effect can appear: We develop a bias towards "our" year as the most inventive, the birth of a modern world, the year the world went from monochrome to colour.

I won't be challenging that bias - I think it's fairly benign as biases go - and well, it's my series of articles, so I'll be writing about all the cool stuff that changed our musical lives in 1982. Let's continue to talk about the Compact Disc.

Access to Music

In part 1, we looked at the early 80's birth of the silver disc, before zooming onto the questionable shovelware CD-ROMs of 1988 in part 2. And the shovelware never really ended, when it comes to the CD-ROM! Often times, developers would grab 650MB of themed content (art, music, public domain software, etc) and bung it on CD. Folks nowadays might struggle see the value in that - but one has to remember that in the late 90's, virtually no one had home broadband. Most folk used 56kbps dial-up modems - with real world common download speeds of 5 KB/s - or one mp3 music file every 12 minutes!

In this age, CDs were the way of browsing large file directories, so I'd like to talk through a few CD's that gave me valuable musical (and multimedia) experiences.

1. Hutchinson Encyclopedia

One of the first, exciting hype-moments for CD came with claims that "a whole set of encyclopedias can fit on a single disc!" - and I fully felt that hype when first experiencing the Hutchinson Encyclopedia. You could browse 1000's of historical photographs, search for articles by title - and listen to a wide range of historical speeches or other sounds of interest - whilst an image of the subject appeared on screen. Sure, it's a far cry from googling a subject to find high quality videos, but for a kid that was used to flicking through books - this was the first time I could access data in a non-linear format. Life-changing.

2. CU Amiga/Amiga Format Coverdiscs

I've talked about this subject before but wow - it's wild to think that the Music Software I still use to this day - OctaMED Soundstudio, was given away on for free on a coverdisc! But that rise in freeware & shareware became the territory we found ourselves in, towards the end of the Amiga's commercial life. Alongside OctaMED, this CD-ROM included many example songs ("mods") to dissect and learn from. These discs were a welcome sight each month throughout the 90's - something interesting on each one!

In OctaMED (and indeed, all trackers) the hex commands that accompany each note allow for elaborate step-based automation; volume, pitch slides, sample start offset and the like. Here's a video of OctaMED Soundstudio in action:

3. Sounds Terrific

Now, whilst my beloved Coverdiscs offered a generous 50-100MB of samples and mods (alongside pictures, animations, game demos and the like) that pales in comparison to dedicated audio CD-ROM collections, e.g. Sounds Terrific by Weird Science. This double disc set contained 1.2 Gigabytes of audio utilities, players and most importantly; thousands of mod files.

I learned so much about multiple electronic music genres by loading up other people's tunes, nicking the samples and having a go at remixing them myself. I think the staggering thing about these collections of music, is the complete wild west, legally grey area they occupied. Were these artists consulted before inclusion on these commercial CD-ROMS (presumably, if you uploaded your song to Aminet - it was fair game!) and furthermore, do the songs themselves contain copyrighted samples? Probably; no one cared!

4. Speccy ClassiX '98

And finally - a title that was for me, my first taste of retro emulation - several thousand ZX Spectrum games pressed onto a single disc, alongside the Amiga & PC software for playing them. By the end of my Spectrum journey I'd amassed 100s of tapes - yet traversing this CD-ROM archive of instantly loading .z80 files, of games I'd owned and ones I'd merely read about, created a potent level of excitement (what a nerd, LOL). Again, legal? Probably not - many ZX Spectrum authors have, in recent years, declared their work public domain - but some have refused, a decision that is rightfully theirs.

To bring it back to audio - I think I've been chasing that excitement ever since. Some dig for bones and artifacts for a job - yet my brand of digital archaeology, uncovering obsolete hardware & software - stems from these early experiences of emulation.

Thanks for joining on me in celebrating the spinning disc. Join me next time for more cool 80's tech!