Early CD-ROM Drives: Why Did They Require a Caddy?

Today if you even have an optical drive, it is likely a tray-loader or a slide-in mechanism. In the early days of computer CD-ROM drives users were often required to place their precious CDs into an awkward little container called a CD Caddy. Why did we use CD Caddies and why did they vanish?
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Sources mentioned in this video:
[ Retro Scan of the Week ] The CD-ROM Caddy: www.vintagecomp...
Philips CM100 the first CD-ROM player: • Philips CM100 the firs...
#retrocomputing #retrogaming #vintage #cd-rom

[@Derpy1969]

Q: why did we use caddies and why did we stop? A: We don’t know and couldn’t find anyone who did know, but we have a lot of guesses.

[@randall.chamberlain]

Forgot the part where he asks if anyone is an engineer and knows the answer

[@georgeprice4212]

The caddies were repurposed and used in the first CD Jukeboxes around 1996-1997.

[@denshi-oji494]

From what I remember, CD Caddies where pretty much there at the beginning of the Data CD, which was NOT considered or used as a consumer media. It was used for many applications in the business, scientific and commercial worlds however. Yes, the discs were typically expensive, and difficult to replace if something happened to them. It only made sense to design the use of them to be protected, which the caddies did quite well. The intent was indeed to place the DATA CD (CD-ROM) in the caddy and never remove it until a newer disc was released to replace it, such as newer release version of an automotive parts catalog. I remember when buying my first computer CD drives, that I specifically searched for the higher end, more expensive CADDY units, even though by then the tray versions were readily available. I still have a very nice SCSI Yamaha 4X burner with a caddy. Even years after the typical CD-ROM drives were no longer using caddies, DVD-RAM drives still were available with Caddies! They typical use cases of many DVD-RAM users, still demanded the extra safety afforded by the caddies.

[@OpenGL4ever]

I used DVD-RAMs but i never used caddies. I bought only DVD-(R/W/RAM) drives that didn't need a caddy.

[@DukeDudeston]

Only time I used "Caddys" was on the schools brand spanking new CD-ROM PC and I can see why they used caddys there, they were roughly handled (by staff and students) and I am sure that expensive copy of Encarta would have been scratched to buggery within the first week. I think that's the main reason, just to protect the disc for school/business environments and when the CD came home it was easier to try to use the caddy system to allow people to protect at home. But as you say in the video the price of discs dropped quite a fair bit making the need for caddys obsolete.

[@SuperVstech]

Wait... The question isn’t answered in the video? I was flabbergasted with caddies when they came out. Couldn’t understand why the diskman didn’t need one, but the computer did... It made sense when the CDRAM disks came in the caddy... but nothing else made sense, and I was happy when 2 and 4x drives came out with trays, or slots even.

[@R33Racer]

I always thought it was for cost reasons. It's cheaper to produce a CD ROM drive without tray mechanisms and motors.

[@joojoojeejee6058]

In theory, yes, but cheap CD audio players did have trays back then, so... I don't know. I'm thinking the caddy was used for reliability and durability reasons.

[@dwarf365]

@@joojoojeejee6058 I think you are miss remembering. There were tray loading CD players but they were major expensive. All of the "cheap" drives before multi speed were either top loading with the clamp in the lid or caddy loaded. Yes, they figured it out quickly, but I'm pretty sure sony had the only single speed tray loader and it was hugely expensive. Yes I am old, i was there. 😒

[@joojoojeejee6058]

@@dwarf365 I'm talking about the early 1990s. I'm pretty sure that tray loading audio CD-players were pretty common back then, and I mean seperate bookself HiFi-type CD-players, not portable units or all-in-one units.

[@dwarf365]

@@joojoojeejee6058 caddys were late 70s to very early 90s. A quote for you "As CD-ROM titles began to drop to the under $100-per-disc mark (very early 1990s), tray-loading CD-ROM drives emerged that did not require caddies. " Yes in the mid 90s that was true but not the era discussed in the video. A history article for you. www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/842/retro-scan-of-the-week-cd-rom-caddy

[@ERGLupin]

Yeah, seems like the cost of a CD-ROM drive was so much it made since to push the consumer to buy one part of them separately. Kind of makes me think of modern phones with "camera bumps" on the back. That design is clearly done so you can have a case on but keep it as thick as the camera bump, which means the phone is ergonomically less than ideal without SOME sort of case. Phone manufacturers could chuck in a cheap case but instead offset that cost to the consumer. But we are also getting phones these days with much thinner profit margins than before so shrug

[@lifeschool]

Someone was asking about 3.5" Disk Drives today on Lemon, and I think it kind of answers your question, in a roundabout way. Basically you were right, they were used to prevent dust and jam and hair, and finger-prints on the CDs. I remember the ads on Tomorrows World where they said CDs were unbreakable, and they were hitting them with hammers. "The disk drive heads float a few microns above the disk, and are like metal clips above and below. Back in the day, most disk head 'cleaners' used a hard type of material, which scratched the surface like sandpaper. Really the heads only need a very fine wipe, and the best head cleaners use clear tape and an alcohol/nail varnish remover-type liquid, very much like a VCR head cleaner. Particles of dirt on the disks cant be cleaned unfortunately. Its made worse because when the disk spins up, this creates a small vacuum, and air rushes in through the gaps around the disk drive door, right onto the open hole of the spinning disk. This was an issue with early CD-roms to some degree, and lead to some drives needing the discs inserted in their own cases, to limit damage to the laser read head, and avoid dust bouncing around in a vortex under the spinning discs. Today, CDs are often inserted between two filters, which wipe away the surface dust and stop the vacuum effect, as the disc spins. Sorry to go off topic."

[@CantankerousDave]

DVD-RAM discs were still using caddies in the early 2000s.

[@jmkhenka]

yes but they are quite diffrent in both use and tech, they where more aking to floppies in the usage so the caddies was quite reasonable, and they where (are?) expensive.

[@Stoppskylten]

But it is not really anything that comes with any particular media format is it. Or are there actual numbers supporting this anecdote? If anything DVD-RAM had less drives with caddy load, as this format was commonly supported by disc video recorders back when that was a thing, and those rarely had caddie load.

[@Veso266]

how do you backup DVD-RAM drive with caddy?I have a couple of them that I cannot stick into my PC as the caddy is to big and door won't close

[@michalparacka1291]

@@Veso266 Take the disc out of the caddy, they should have a notch on one side that opens the caddy.

[@wisteela]

@@Veso266 Some had a bit of plastic you could pop out so you could open them.

[@quaqstar]

Why did we REMOVE Caddies? Thats the better question

[@vasopel]

simple answer, a disk inside a caddy can't reach high speeds because it gets scratched on the caddy itself.

[@constantinosschinas4503]

@@vasopel interesting and logical. wonder if it is totally valid.

[@vasopel]

@@constantinosschinas4503 maybe I should have written everything that was in my mind :-) My thinking is that the the reason they didn't make high speed caddy drives was because if for what ever reason the power to the drive gets cut off while the drive is spinning at high speeds, the disk will definitely get damaged! ;-) that is because if a caddy is inserted in a drive and there is no power, even slight movement of the drive could cause the disk to rub against the caddy, so imagine what would happen if the disk is spinning at 50x and there is a power outage!!! I thought of that after I read these: "The loading of the caddy (in the drive) unlocks the caddy's pickup permitting it to move , the disk is then held in place by the drive's mechanism*, if the drive is offline and there is movement there is a possibly of damage" *Magnetic Disc Clamper "A magnetic clamp simply holds the disc in place when the magnet (built into the upper half of the clamp) pulls down to the metallic spindle table while sandwiching the disc between them."

[@Tech-geeky]

because we needed to play other games?

[@NYXsucksatyoutube]

Unnecessary

[@exodous02]

My grade school had old computers(grade schools always use computers 30 years past what home users have them for) and all but 3 caddies in the library and 5 in the computer lab were long gone so the librarian or a teacher were the only ones that were allowed to handle them. It was crazy because at home we had a old computer with a CD-ROM with a tray AND it was a burner. My school district had a huge upgrade when I was in Jr. High and all the caddies just went in the trash, all those years thinking they were really expensive and seeing them in the trash was a little weird. I felt like digging them out of the trash but never did.

[@volkhen0]

First CDs were 650MB not 700MB.

[@HUNKragor]

Really, remember them

[@ez45]

Proceeds to show a DVD+R straight after

[@Tech-geeky]

were there any 700MB ? I only remember 650MB.. Perhaps 700MB (unformatted) but 650MB user data?

[@cynth0984]

@@Tech-geeky there were 650MB/74min; 700MB/80min and even 800MB/90min CDs

[@spavatch]

@@cynth0984 - yeah, but we’re talking 1990. 700+ MB CDs didn’t become popular until the late 90s

[@neutrinophyre6999]

When I was in school. The it class had a tower system consisting of a 50mhz SLC 486, 8mb Ram, and 6 cdrom drives that used caddies. Caddies were used in school as discs would get scratched rather easily.

[@gillesvanleeuwen]

I came here because I'm looking for these very weird CD-i caddies. Where you would insert the caddy and the drive would eat the disc out of the caddy. Leaving you with an empty caddy. If you wanted to get the disc out, you'd have to re-insert the caddy and the disc would be back in it. These caddies were also a lot thinner then the ones shown in this video. This memory is from when I was 4-5 years old. 33 now.

[@andrewlittleboy8532]

I still use a caddy SCSI drive on my Acorn A4000. Interestingly the CDROM drive has a built in brush to clean the lens!

[@daishi5571]

The Archimedes was a great system in its day.

[@builder396]

I still remember a special CD that had integrated brushes on the surface to clean the lens.

[@pentiummmx2294]

my 386DX PC had a scsi caddy drive, it later got replaced with a faster tray loading cd drive. and also got upgraded to a pentium 120 at a later date. the 386 and motherboard and hdd and caddy drive are long gone since they were sold back then.

[@Patrick_AUBRY]

Blu-ray (ish) disc still use cady in the form of XDCAM cartridges.

[@craigtheaircooler2580]

They kinda look like UMD discs

[@paulgascoigne5343]

I loved caddy drives.. It would be fantastic to retrofit a blu ray player inside. For weirdos like me anyway.

[@thaernejem7317]

I recall that my first pc back in 94 was lacking the “media kit” which was the sound card and the cd rom because they were massively expensive

[@andylloyd8176]

Nice video. I remember i was the envy of my street, as my older brother got me the hard drive for the Amiga 1200. High end gaming PC owner these days but i do miss the old days. Just walking into a shop and asking for a box of 50 blank floppys was legend (Xcopy) cough ha ha

[@CommodoreFan64]

I remember doing that with Maverick Disc copy on the C64, and later on in the mid - late 90's I would be stoked when I was at the local flea market, and a seller had a stack of 50 CD-R disc for cheap, so I could copy games from friends, of course there was always a couple of disc from that stack that where just bunk, and ended up as drink coasters lol!

[@andylloyd8176]

@@CommodoreFan64 Yes i remember all to well, when trying to copy a game from a freind and it failed from a dodgy floppy disk. Was awesome when it worked tho. Went out with 4 blank disks, then came home with Jim Powers & Turrican 3 :)

[@MrJest2]

Oh, yes - my first CD drives at work used caddies. This was about '89 or '90 or so, when I was running a software QA lab and needed to load images of specific software and network configurations on the lab stations for test runs. I also had the only CD burner in the company in my office - at the time, it was about $7000. Caddies were a pain to use, but it was still less potentially problematic and expensive than my previous solution, which was to set everything up with swappable drive bays and maintain a library of test environment hard drives... which were, of course, mounted in their own versions of "caddies". Fragile, expensive, and bulky vs. cheap and easily replaceable justified the expense of the burner and a handful of external CD drives. And yes, I would occasionally take the burner home on weekends and use it to backup my home systems onto CDs... only one of my friends to have CD backup for several years. :-)

[@SenileOtaku]

I worked at a multimedia software company, and our CD duplication setup used caddies. It was a custom system that had three CD-R SCSI drives (each on it's own 8-bit SCSI card); we'd read the disk to be copied to the HDD in the machine, then tell the system whether we needed 1, 2 or 3 copies, and it could write all three at once on the blazingly-fast 4x CD burners. No monitor or keyboard, you selected your options on a 2-line LCD panel. Oh, and it was 650MB disks, and only later on did we actually get 700MB blanks (at $20 each). We used the 700MB disks for building masters for our encyclopedia/dictionary/thesaurus/etc product.

[@TheHangarHobbit]

Ya know it wasn't the CD-ROM that blew my mind, at the time computer CDs were becoming a big whoop I was working at a PC shop running a dual Celeron 300a OCed to nearly 550Mhz set up with a whopping 20gb of storage attached (Anybody remember those old Tyan dual socket boards? Ahh being able to multicore in the 90s, good times) but what blew me away and caused me to spend WAAAY too much money was the first burners! Being able to store 650Mb of data at a time when the biggest portable storage was a 100Mb Zip disk? Sign me up! I ended up spending nearly $300 on one of the first CD burners followed by nearly the same amount for one of the first DVD burners a few years later. I actually still have a couple of CD/RWs and a DVD/RW from that time period and amazingly they still read after all these years. Now everyone is moving away from discs but I still have a DVD Burner (A Lightscribe one, I miss Lightscribe) and a Bluray burner in my gamer box and as long as i can get media I'll keep them around, having a hared copy of my data off my PC still makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

[@andyzib]

My memory says Sony wanted all disks sold in a caddy that couldn’t be removed, but Phillips didn’t want the extra cost in the standard, and the reusable caddy was a compromise that didn’t take off with consumers. Sony formats like MiniDisk and UMD backup my memory, though I wish I could remember a source to confirm my memory...

[@CptJistuce]

The 3.5" floppy disk was a Sony format too. More circumstantial evidence. Also, the UMD was originally intended to have a shutter. It was omitted late to reduce costs(early PSPs have a shutter-open mechanism)

[@Mario_N64]

Exactly. It was a Sony thing. Initially, Sony wanted caddies for Blu-ray discs. It's all about control.

[@Jurgh909]

I had that Pioneer CD rom changer you briefly can see at the beginning! Not a caddy per se, rather a cassette for 6 CD roms. Used it for sharing files at my BBS.

[@Lucasrainford]

I remember the caddy system in the CDTV. A system I craved to own back then but with a price tag way outa my wage bracket, I was a big Amiga fan and when I saw the full CDTV setup with its all black style and CD drive I fell in love. I never did own one :( You got one for a Xmas gift! ya jammy little bugger Dan ;)

[@MM-gt8cg]

I remember these. Only used one in my CDTV, like you say Dan the spare caddies were expensive - almost the price of a floppy based game.

[@SSteelification]

I always figured it was the mechanisms of the time or the coating that protects the data. Heck for a while i heard that Blu-rays were supposed to come in caddies because of how scratch-prone they were.

[@AmyraCarter]

Aside from the PSP, yes I do have experience with CD caddies. It was with Kid Pix on Windows 95, with a PC that had four disk drives (two 5.75"/one 3.5"/one CD-ROM) as well as a 2.65 GB HDD; the CD-ROM drive required the use of a CD caddy. At the time, I had no other experience with the compact disc format so I had no point of reference, so...yeah. Looking back at it now, only inconvenience I recall was the caddies sometimes sticking due to the terminal being used a lot and running fourteen hours a day minimum. I never had to swap the disc or anything though.

[@NiebaumCurran]

The music department in my secondary school had an Apple based computer that had a CD-ROM that used a caddy system, this was the late ninties and I can remember what model of Mac it was, but I thought it was strange that this was the only computer I had seen that used caddys as all the other computers in the school used a regular tray loader.

[@HelloKittyFanMan.]

"Apple-based"? Why not just say "Mac" and be done with it?

[@paulgascoigne5343]

I remember at school we mostly had BBC micros, even in secondary school. Though in the library there were a few acorn A3010s which were on a network, attached to a caddy CDROM so we could use the various encyclopedias and multimedia discs, though they were very different to the types of things available today!

[@RedHeat]

I still have a CDTV under the TV, was nice to see the A570 briefly pop up.

[@mcrecordings]

I had a SCSI CD-ROM that used a caddy, I had it cos a friends dad gave me some old SCSI stuff which was obsolete by that point. The caddy was a faff, and the opening tabs were prone to snapping off if you dropped it. The drive didn't have a faceplate so it was a bit cyberpunky (in my head at least). I also remember having an external tape drive I never used to terminate it which one night when I was in bed decided to catch fire...

[@kamiledi15]

I love old electronics and few day ago I purchased working cd-rom drive from 1993 with caddy. 1x speed, connected by SCSI controller. It works perfectly in my retro Dos computer. It even opens CDs recorded by new dvd-rom without any problems.

[@RandomBitzzz]

The college I attended had a massive library of magazine and newspaper articles stored on CDs, all in caddies. You would punch in your search, it would tell you which disc to retrieve, then you popped it into the drive. Back then the idea was to replace microfiche/microfilm with this digital media, and the caddies helped to protect the discs. Now everything is on the Google.

[@ukrainica9121]

A Cd-rom drive on a XT PC, that is insane lol. My first experience with a cd-rom drive was in the early 90's. Single speed, that had to be pushed in, and then pulled out by hand. it had a lid, that opened 'automatically'. Cd-rom in, lid closed, pushed back in, and it was ready. My dad worked for Ahold, an umbrella supermarket concern now better known as Albert Heijn in the netherlands, on the IT department.. He was allowed to take home all the obsolete server hardware that got replaced, so every single piece of hardware (mainly storage hardware, like HUGE HDD's in MB's for the time, tape drives, SCSI ISA cards to connect it) got tested in our poor 80386SX machine we got at home.. A lot of the hardware wasnt compatible, but some of the SCSI HDD's and tape drives were.. Alot of fighting with available resources (IRQ, DMA, etc) but man it was awesome..

[@emuguru]

I remember using caddies all the time with family members PCs in the 90s. And in 2011 I went to a used book store and found a mint condition box of Kong’s Quest VI. When I got the box home and opened it I found the original sales receipt for Day of the Tentacle, and a return/exchange slip showing the owner traded it back in for King’s Quest VI. There was a letter from LucasArts tech support with ideas for fixing audio issues with Day of the Tentacle. Finally, the disc was in a caddie. And it appears to have never been removed as it is pristine. Very awesome find and the reason I searched for and found your video. Thanks for an awesome vid!

[@Saavik256]

I remember *seeing* caddy-based drives, but I never owned one. I do however still have my old 4x speed cd changer drive (5 disks in a single height drive!)

[@Rudolf_Edward]

Despite the reactions from below, i found this video very interesting. And the answer to the question was given in this video: to protect precious cd's and maybe a patent matter. My experience with these caddies is the use of magneto optical drives for audio postproduction. The media within was fixed, so you couldn't swap. It was just a protactive case, like MiniDisk. And just recently, collegue cameramen were using these caddy disks for recording their material. Nowadays, fixed media like memorycards are taking over. I like the look of those caddy's, though!

[@user-uk8sz8ws6k]

When it is expected to have a caddy for every disc, then why not just use the caddy as packaging, instead of the jewel case?

[@brostenen]

Because music cd's came before, and every cd player for the stereo that were for home use, all used motorised tray at that time. So people were used to jewel cases.

[@dukethecat]

Just just picked up that exact AppleCD player you have in your video

[@SteveStoltz]

I remember my first cd drive for my A2000 was a Plextor 2x with a caddy. At that point tray versions were available but all I could afford at the time was the used Plextor. The tray was a pain but I was excited to even have a cd drive so it didn’t matter. Lol

[@thromboid]

My first experience with CD-ROM caddies was in the late 1980s, when the library my parents worked at acquired some CD-ROM systems. The drives were large external pizza-box Hitachi units with proprietary interface cards (I thought they might be SCSI, but apparently not). I don't remember if the discs in the collection were stored in caddies, but as you say in the video, it would make sense that users wouldn't handle the costly discs directly. I actually picked up one of the drives when they were decommissioned and used it as my bedside music CD player for a time - the drives had a headphone output and with the right DIP switch setting it would auto-play a CD-DA when inserted. No transport buttons, so I had to listen all the way through!

[@thromboid]

Actually, I might be conflating two models - the bedside player was probably a later Hitachi CDR-1700S, which had the DIP switches and headphone output, and was about half the width of the earlier model (possibly CDR-1502S). The library had both models. All single-speed, of course, but apparently the CDR-1700S had the fastest access time of a CD-ROM drive on its release - 340 ms! :)

[@untouchblz]

I am by far the techie and retro tech lover in my family and group of friends. I never even knew this existed! Great stuff!!! Thank you for this history lesson!!!

[@houstonhelicoptertours1006]

I used these well into the early 2000s(in professional studio environments) - for both protecting the media of expensive software as well as convenient storage of stock library(audio/video/graphics) discs.

[@the7observer]

thank you, I was researching for an analysis of a video game called signalis which is a sci-fi horror game that has 80s like tech. In-game there is a blue disk that looks like a floppy and a lot of people immediately thinks is a floppy but looking at it in detail is actually a optical disk in a caddy

[@adrianarnott3814]

Got my Amiga cd drive when my mate who was working at Dixon’s called me and said they were selling them off for about 40 quid!

[@Rick_Todd]

I never even knew this was a thing. Thanks for the knowledge.

[@lifeschool]

Pure magic! I love all this kind of stuff. Questions like "Can you use a HD floppy as a DD floppy', and 'how do Zip drives work'. All cutting edge stuff. :)

[@nanuJoe1967]

My first cd recorder (for tv) had caddies for recording on.. infact that was how you got them when you paid for extra discs.

[@KarlHamilton]

One reason would be the drives were cheaper to make. Consider the manual floppy eject mechanism on Amiga versus the fancy electronic one on a Mac. Definitely cheaper to make a mechanical only eject mechanism with no electronics.

[@offrails]

I remember some of the first consumer-grade burners in the mid-late 1990s used caddies, even though most drives at the time were of the standard "cup holder" variety.

[@datashed]

My 90MHz Pentium machine from 1994 had an internal SCSI 4X CD-ROM, the Toshiba XM-3401TA, which was a caddy-based. The NEC MultiSpin 3xe/3xi (3X external and internal drives, respectively) also used caddies. So it might not be quite accurate to say that caddies went away as soon as drives faster than single-speed were introduced.

[@MegaManNeo]

I'm born in the early 90's, so I can't remember those at all but every since I first heard of them I find it sad these aren't a thing anymore. Not just were these still protected, one could actually put covers on the caddies and to borrow the disc to someone wouldn't result in getting a fully messed up media returned. The closest thing to CD caddies I can actively think of are PSP UMDs which were awesome but also very fragile because of its compact size.

[@Tech-geeky]

only time i used caddies was on my Commodore A570 CD drive.

[@mattcintosh2]

I remember early Apple CD drives being caddies, even the one on the Quadra. There was a few basically "CD-ROM Discmans" which were portable CD players with a SCSI port that could also be used as a CD-ROM drive. There was the Apple PowerCD which allowed viewing photos on the TV as well with a remote control (pretty cool looking device as well). I have a Pinnacle Micro RCD-1000 from March 1995 that is a caddy load CD *Burner*. I can't seem to get it to work, but I remember drooling over it in a computer catalog at the time and it was about $2,000.

[@one_b]

I remember using caddies in the library and computer lab in elementary school and junior high for a short time or the odd "older" system. I wondered why they didn't just make it like a large version of a 3.5in floppy with a thin plastic case to wrap all discs rather than make require bulky caddies? Would a permanent protective shell and being sold in a small box have been worse than plastic jewel cases?

[@wisteela]

Great video. I have some old caddy drives, one of which is an external writer. I must see if it actually still works. I didn't know of those studio players using them. One thing though: The original capacity was 640MB.

[@NikhchansGaming]

Ohh I didn't knew the caddy stuff was available for consumers! I thought it was like prototype CDs. Before they developed disc drives that didn't require caddies. Nice video!

[@RobertNES816]

I remember the public library by me used CD caddies up until the late 90's, it took them a long time to get regular CD roms and eventually just have everything hooked up to the internet. Man does time fly, I still remember how cool it was to finally have Windows 95 on my 486DX2 PC. It was slow as hell on the internet but it worked lol. Plus my Dad gave me his old double speed CD ROM drive because he bought a 20x TDK cd rom drive. I still remember our amazement the first time we heard the TDK drive spool up for the first time lol.

[@volo870]

I have one of those CD-ROMs for Amiga 500. Didn't know how to use it - crammed in an audio CD without a caddy. It played, so I believe there is nothing to assume that caddies help CDs spin.

[@SlyPearTree]

My first CD-ROM drive used a caddy, It was a NEC with a speed of 3X and a SCSI interface if I remember correctly. It also had its own little LCD screen, headphone jack and buttons to play CDs without the use of software.

[@denshi-oji494]

All the CD-ROM drives used to have buttons and a headphone jack. I think NEC may have been the only one that also had some models with displays however. Not sure but I think there may also have been a Yamaha that had a display. I was really surprised when the play button, and headphone jack vanished from CD-ROM drives. The first time I saw one like that, I thought, it was a cheap drive... and certainly would not become the norm... was I wrong there.

[@SkynetCyb]

Hey it's pretty nice to see you still around! I remember you from all the Amiga videos and all, nice video too it's something I wondered a lot!

[@thatguyontheright1]

I theorized that early drives used caddies because they could utilize a smaller form factor than a top loading drive, but still make it cheaper to produce by using an eject mechanism similar to a 3.5 inch floppy drive.

[@Lilithe]

Our first CD-ROM drive was a 2x or 4x drive and it certainly did use a caddy. It came with a CD full of shareware and freeware called ZIDRAV which I have never seen anyone else really talk about. There were a few other demo discs as well.

[@Lilithe]

Corporate Scumbags, Dope Wars and a bunch of other late text adventure games were on there. There was a clip of a song converted into an EXE that would play through the PC speaker. All kinds of games. Some weird tools like some kind of bird call simulator. It's as if someone downloaded every weird thing that caught their interest on a BBS and put it on this CD and had it professionally pressed and released along side the CD ROM drive.

[@Harp00nX]

I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact that using caddies saved money on manufacturing the actual drives as it eliminated the cost of an electronic loading mechanism.

[@brostenen]

My plextor SCSI drive, have an electric caddy ejection mechanism.

[@beszt95]

I got a ThinkPad 755CSE recently with the Selectadock II from 1994/95, and when I went to use the CD-ROM drive on the dock, I wasn't expecting a caddy to pop out because I'd never even heard of something like that lol. I also find it cool that you worked at a radio station in the late 90s... there's a small radio station & studio that I've been volunteering at since the very beginning of 2018.

[@MrJ0mmy]

I remember when I was young a CD blew up in my CD drive

[@wisteela]

Now I'm curious.

[@daishi5571]

@@wisteela On fast spin CD-ROM drives, if the cd inserted was damaged, the act of spinning the disk up to maximum speed could shatter the entire disk like it was made of glass.

[@wisteela]

@@daishi5571 I thought that would have been what had happened. I've seen the remains of a disc that did that whilst on a training course.

[@daishi5571]

@@wisteela I once did it with a CD drive I removed the case from. Kept finding CD shards for years.

[@RuruFIN]

I remember my cousin's dad telling that a CD flew out like a frisbee from his drive, the CD didn't stop spinning when he opened the drive. It was those first 48X or 52X drives.

[@matthewgragg2152]

If the CDs were sold already in the caddies then they would have been the norm today. I would like to see this come back because it's very convenient to have a CD with you already in a protective case that's ready to play. Just like mini discs. I didn't know anything like this even existed, but was looking for something like this because it would be great for a portable CD player.

[@bazza5699]

i've still got a dvdwriter on my pc :) always handy if, like me, you live in the last decade..lol

[@Frostie3672]

Only 1,i I had 3 dvd burners lol. Ditched my old cooler master haf case now though and have a tempered glass tower case with no drive bays, I kept the drives though as I plan on getting a USB 3 adaptor with 12v power so I can use the drives externally. Yes I know I can just buy a usb dvd writer, I have a samsung one, but they're slow & only go upto 8x read /write speeds. I'm a bit old school as well, I don't tend to use cd's much anymore to store stuff though, I've gone the hdd route for that now instead but sometimes I just like to use cd's for some things.

[@bazza5699]

@@Frostie3672 yeah it's weird. i've been looking for a new pc case.. more and more come with no drive bays at all. what do they think i'm going to play my old x-files dvd's on?... lol

[@ssaj008]

I worked in the summer of 1994 to save up and I purchased a 3X NEC multispin SCSI that used a caddie. I thought the NEC was beautiful because it had a LCD screen on the front and buttons to play a music CD so you didn’t need to use a program to listen to music. At the time caddies was not so popular anymore but if you wanted 3X speed instead of 2X speed your only choice was the NEC that used a caddie. The popular choice was the creative labs 2X CD-Rom bundled with the SoundBlaster 16 which was IDE. The choice I went with was the SoundBlaster 32 AWE which had 2X dimm slots & a SCSI interface. I also planned on getting a SCSI 500 meg hard drive as well. It wasn’t a big deal to change the CD’s in the caddie and it would be difficult to scratch the CD.

[@0raffie0]

We were early adopters of CD writers, bought our first one in 1996, it was a 2x writer and used a caddy.

[@Yukatoshi]

That's actually pretty late.

[@danh5637]

It was an upsell. You've spent this much on your CDROM, now we offer this caddy to help you protect it whilst in use. There was a fear that even small scratches would ruin them back then. Also Steve Jobs went apoplectic when the very first iMac had a tray loading cd drive, he wanted a slot loader which came in v2, but for some reason it wasn't implemented in v1, and he lost his mind.

[@georgemaragos2378]

Hi All, From memory back in the day most shops advised the "older" caddy types were best to store and protect expansive cd media. But as the price per CD and also blank burnable cd's came out the cost of media went down dramatically In hindsight they were basically correct, the amount of scratched and permanently damaged cdroms and dvd's that i have at home are all caused by careless wife and kids who treat them like they are made of metal and nothing can go wrong Every new CD/DVD that i buy gets ripped to a external hard drive Regards George

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Remember my first pair of blank CDs I bought, They were behind glass and you had to ring for the employee to come over and carry them to the cashier.

[@RandomBitzzz]

I thought I got a screaming deal when I got a 10 pack for $40... circa 1996

[@Neojhun]

I weirdly got to use DVD-RAM in the early 2000s. It was a very interesting storage for it time and quite large at over 4gb. It was after CD-Rom yet it still used Caddies for the protection reason. DVD-RAM was marketed for more Rewrite Sessions / Chunks or Archive. Thus I Caddies were meant to protect the discs.

[@tommik1283]

I do not think a caddy is a real protection for a disc. Once a lot of dust and particles pile up inside it means scratching the surface. Better protect the discs in standard jewel cases and let them breathe freely on a tray...

[@Neojhun]

@@tommik1283 Oh yeah it much less effective on Dust. But it's for Physical Contact scratches, that is almost entirely eliminated.

[@TinWhisker]

Up until 2010 (when I changed jobs, so haven't played with call recording tools since), DVD-RAM was the norm for long term call log storage. You could get HDD banks, but we were still reeling from HDD reliability issues and DVDs were far easier to cold store for a few years. We had about 5 caddies and about several hundred double sided DVD-RAM disks on spindles, that I would prep for the week, then whenever my colleagues or myself went into the server room, would flip to side B or switch caddy, then mark the case. Our first recorder had a very small buffer, so would scream near disk completion. The later ones had a HDD for buffer, so we could limit server room access at weekends and only need to do the swaps a few times each morning to catch up. I also wrote a tool to parse the disk and grab recordings, because the recorder was otherwise always occupied and just dropping the disk into a regular DVD-RAM capable drive would not show because of the proprietary formatting. Why DVD-RAM over DVD-R, because at catch-up, data would be streamed and could be paused or erased 'live'. (I.e. this call was confidential, remove from backup)

[@Frostie3672]

Minidisc brings back memories, I had that hardware for my A1200, used the squirrel scsi to connect it up, was so cool being able to store 250mb on a disc! How times change though eh, now I'm filling up 4tb hdd drives on my pc in no time at all lol

[@daishi5571]

I didn't think about attaching a Minidisc to my Amiga.

[@Frostie3672]

@@daishi5571 actually I got the name completely wrong lol, it wasn't a minidisc drive, it was the zip drive made by iomega.

[@rationalrabbit797]

I still have a working Panasonic LF-D521 DVD burner that accepts both caddies as well as naked discs. It also reads and writes DVD-RAMdiscs in addition to the usual CD and DVD RW and ROM discs. I keep all my DVD-RAM discs in caddies, although they too will work on their own. Keeps the discs dust and scratch free. I have the drive installed in an external case connected by USB-2. Still works perfectly after these many years. Caddies make the discs much easier to use and prevents deterioration. It's only a cost cutting measure to get rid of them. If cost were not an issue we would still use them. Cheap = worse every time.

[@gilbertsprojects2954]

Our school library had the first proper PC (they had a couple of BBC computers) in the school and that had a CD drive with a caddy... that’s my only experience of them, when I started building pc’s a few years later they were long gone and we were up to 12x CD roms! Lol

[@MrVictorBaarn]

The caddies were used to better protect the CDs from scratches, this was actually intended for data CDs, as they required a much more precise correction than music CDs. In case of an error in music CDs, 4 millisecs of a fragment is skipped and the previous part of 4 milisecs ( without errors ) is "pasted" in between, before data is send to the AD convertor buffer. (you hear it twice but your brain does not detect this ) Data CDs had a much tighter tolerance, the music error correction does not work there.

[@tomlee80]

My Dad owned a Scorpio Granada in in 1990-91 that had a Blaupunkt Caddy CD Player and cassette deck. It came with three caddys and this was ultra useful when it came to him tossing out a Eurythmics CD for some MC Hammer. After destroying plenty of discs on the move in my own car in the 2000s I can see why a Caddy would have served it's purpose here :)

[@islygon]

Yep! The company I worked for in the late 90's had a SCSI CD burner... they were still expensive at the time... and it used a CD Caddy...

[@shadowflash705]

Eric Lamb I had CDU-920S from 1995 I think till 2008. It was installed in AppleCD enclosure. From 68k Mac Quadra to PPC Performa 64?? with G3 upgrade, full 136Mb of RAM and video card capable of 1024x768, if not higher, with final machine being AthlonXP 2800+. I think total number of CD burned was way more than 30000. For people curious how I obtained that for home use it was simple - a company where my dad worked had one and it was also in external enclosure and they dropped it. Caddy was jammed, drive not reading anything so they just threw it away and bought a new one. My dad brought it home for me for parts. Surprisingly repair took 10 minutes - just some misaligned parts in the mechanism. And I got myself a CD writer when it was a pretty much a dream made of high grade unobtanium. Dad being able to bring 10-50 blank CDs in a month absolutely officially for free helped a lot also till the late 90s when blank cd became affordable. And yeah I had most used games and software in separate caddies, about 120 of them I think. But yeah, opening and closing the caddy each time you want to burn a CD or just use another CD was quite annoying. But... it's still working somewhere with my old Mac to run some obscure devkit board (no, it's not 3DO devkit) The times when Sony and Apple were still making quality reliable hardware...

[@islygon]

Shadow Flash Yep, they were built like tanks! Mine never broke, it was just slow... I think it was a single or double speed burner...and weighed a ton!

[@MadameSomnambule]

The old caddies kinda remind me a bit of the discs used on the PSP as they were also basically cds (but in a teeny tiny size) protected by a case.

[@AshtonCoolman]

I recently bought a Plextor external SCSI CD-ROM for a special IBM PS/2 model 70 386DX-20 with micro channel slots I put together. The darn thing used a caddy so I just ordered one on EBay. It's now the most expensive retro pc I've spent money on...

[@waitingonmarc]

I miss my Plextor drives. I had a special SCSI dual optical drive setup with a 2 gig SCSI HDD. The machines only job was to copy CDs.

[@OpenGL4ever]

I still have all my Plextor drives.

[@Fifury161]

I too have all the drives shown in this video, I also have a few CD towers. Plenty of caddies, frustratingly I never had enough. Once 4GB SCSI hard drives were available I ended up converting a lot of my CDs to ISOs, having 2 CD towers worth of CDs contained on 2 external hard drives was such a gift!

[@joshwitt1475]

Thanks, an interesting video! It's funny that people complain that you didn't answer the question, You provided the best theories based on research.

[@awmosoft]

My first CD ROM play for my Amiga 1200 was an Apple PowerCD CDROM player. It has support for Kodak PhotoCD and has a Composite output, headphone jack and coms with a. It is also a portable CD player which uses 9 batteries. The batteries are empty in about 1.5 hours. It is a SCSI-1 CD-ROM player and it is a single speed CD-ROM and could read disk with 175 KB/s.

[@obsoletepowercorrupts]

For ReWriteable 8cm MiniCD or MiniDVD, it'd be useful and the idea being is you'd commit a CDRW (or DVDRW) to a caddy almost forever. Even if a low capacity 185megabyte CDRW (8cm) was used instead of a 210Megabyte, you could do a lot with it. Likewise for 8cm DVD even a 1.1Gigabyte could be useable (instead of 1.4gigabyte). Even many commonplace linux distros fit on that. Portable media devices (even with some computing ability, and not just media playback) could use it. With a home computer (or media machine with computing ability), having an 8cm CDROM which does not ReWrite (or DVDROM of 8cm) is a great size to accompany a floppy drive. They match up if you hold them together. Fairly power NAS systems can save settings to a floppy while booting the OS and software off the CDROM initially. If it is left on for a long time, an initial slow loading does not matter all that much, in some instances, even taking an hour to load can be ok. An example of that is a VCR where it is programmed to turn itself on from standby and record a TV show or radio or some audio in the middle of the night or during the 9am-5pm daytime. Having a 8cm mini DVD (or CD) system which has a floppy drive reside with such a VCR (especially if linked by AV cables, RS232 and an IR blaster) a lot can be done and it can have loaded slowly during those hours and can have recorded to itself (e.g. from DVD to VCR). For example a DragonsLair style game or _"music sequencer game"_ or _"Rhythm game"_ or _"encylopedia quiz game"_ could do that according to whatever the owner had programmed it to do, or maybe also in conjunction with whatever had is sheduled (such as a radio broadcast of some sort or the weather or stocks-and shares data). A modern incoming signal might be from a LoRa radio device. It was wasteful that the BBC Micro did not have some sort of software to recieve a trickle of radio when connected to a VCR (or teletext or ceefax style information).

[@LakesGeek]

I had one that I 'inherited' from my dad, it connected to the PC via external SCSI and was literally the size of a thin desktop PC. I think we gave it to an old friend of mine at the time once we upgraded to 5.25" tray based CD-ROM drives.

[@Quebecoisegal]

Two things come to mind, the recess must have been wider to accommodate the caddy and I remember the Encyclopedia Britannica disc cost as much as the full set of books, which I can understand but also it was quite ridiculous.

[@orhoushmand85]

I wish the caddies were an integral part of standard optical discs, so that optical discs were not as vulnerable to scratches as they are without the caddies.

[@Corle0ne]

I'm certain that at the time the tray mechanism was both expensive, time-consuming and uncharted territory for most producers. After years of enthusiast repairs and restores of audio CD-players it's obvious to me that they didn't fully know what they were going for. Every new model seemed to have a new design solution and I'm not surprised: combine the width of the tray and the need to retract it with the need to keep costs low and you already have a set of problems. You can only drive it with one motor, meaning all the force is put into one side of the tray. This means the tolerances couldn't be too tight or you would have a jam on the other side where no force was applied. Even with tight tolerances the slack could be noticeable. Then you needed a cut-off point both in front and at the back positions. You'll notice that in the earlier models this solution was quite archaic with simple blade switches at both extremes. Doing this in a full width Hifi-system was doable, but having a go at it within the restrictions of a 5.25" drive must have been thought of as impossible for many years to come. Simply finding a small enough electromotor with high enough torque was probably rough, and I'm certain many engineers would have cringed at how thin and light the trays would turn out to be. I also wouldn't be surprised if someone at the top figured it helped a lot to have the CD caddies looking a lot like a floppy disks to persuade conservative computer owners to make the transition.

[@Modenut]

Back in 1996 I bought a humoncoulusly large HD named the Quantum Bigfoot! It held a mindnumbing 1.2gb of data and needed a 5.45" slot in your sensibly beige chassis. It was a sight to behold. =D

[@Frostie3672]

Hadn't even heard of a cd caddy until I watched this video lol.

[@chizukichan]

My elementary school had some old Macintosh computers in a computer lab nobody used except me (I befriended the principal). They had CD caddies and instead of one to a disc, they were one to a station.

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

I can only remember one CD-ROM i had that was using caddys. I only remember it was a SCSI-drive, and it was in the early/mid90´s. But maybe a bit strange, at the same time i had a car CD with caddy. And with a couple of extra caddys, it was actually very convenient to change disk while driving. Maybe that was the caddy´s biggest advantage.

[@zpepgamer]

Hi Dan, great vid. Sorry I missed you at the Amiga convention in Athlone. I should have been there as I live 10 mins from Athlone but alas I was ill. Enjoyed the vid you did on it it. Anyway thanks for this vid, reminded me of my CDTV. Oh how I wish I still had it! Oh the regrets😁

[@daniel.santos]

I wish we had caddys today. Sure, most folks are better keeping their discs clean, but having a universal standard for what sits on the shelf would be nice. Every disc case is a different size; audio CD, DVD, BR, 4k, PS, Xbox, and various collectors editions of discs. If all of them had a standard caddy/case, it would make things a lot more neat.

[@fdmillion]

I have a still fully functional AppleCD 150 external SCSI drive that uses caddies. 1X speed drive as well. I believe the mechanism itself is actually a Sony unit. The drive works just fine on a semi-modern Linux PC I have with an Adaptec PCI SCSI card. I've actually made good use of it a few times. Had a couple data CDs that were significantly cracked, but the damage didn't extend into the data area. Using the 1X drive I was able to extract ISOs of the discs. If I were to try to stick a partially cracked and damaged CD into any modern drive, it would have immediately shattered as soon as the drive decided to "spin up" to try to read the disc faster!

[@gnramires]

An interesting hypothesis, I would speculate, is familiarity with floppy disks? Users sometimes don't like changing how they interact with technology. Otherwise, the theory of protecting the expensive CDs sounds very plausible.

[@alistairmcelwee7467]

I'd forgotten about these caddy trays. Funny that you remember them & an interesting topic. At the time we just accepted them as part of the new CD tech I think. Also, my Mac Plus from 1987 had an external 20MB drive (huge!) and I saved up to buy the Apple CD read player which, I think, had a caddy. But it might have been an earlier CD machine. Anyway, thanks for the memory lane!

[@dwarf365]

Okay KZbin I watched the caddy video. I always wondered about why it was required. My first CD ROM drive was a 4x creative and sb16 for my 486 dx2 66. We used caddys at school though, hated them. Another great video! Thanks.

[@shannonrose4370]

Do Y’all remember when they had Disc magazines? They called them automatic disc changers too lol. So once you put the whole thing into your stereo, some held between 5-12 CDs, and you could just switch the Cd you wanted to listen to with just the push of a button lol