Word: rw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been testing IBM's Aptiva E Series 585, which shipped to retail stores last week. At $1,899 (a monitor costs extra), the 500-MHz Pentium III desktop PC has the usual amenities, but comes with an internal Sony CD-RW drive. RW is industry jargon for rewriteable, which means it can handle discs that can be recorded over and over again, just like a floppy disc. CD-RW discs, however, tend to cost about $10 each and can be flaky, as I soon learned...
...loaded the golf-game disc in the DVD bay and put a blank CD-RW disc in the recordable drive. Adaptec's "CD-burning" software (Easy CD, Creator and Direct CD) was pre-installed on the PC and started automatically. Following the on-screen prompts, I created a duplicate of my game in about an hour. When the copy was made, the drive automatically ejected the disc, which I popped into my briefcase and took home to my top-secret night...
...however, it started working. Go figure. Even more curious was that it took more than 20 minutes to install the program on my hard drive. When I used the original discs on a similar machine at work, it took less than five minutes. Why? It turns out that CD-RW discs use a less reflective material than CD-R discs, which makes them harder to read on older drives. Indeed, if your CD-ROM drive is more than a year old, it may not be able to read your CD-RW disc...
...catch? Blank music CDs are still expensive. CD-R music discs cost $6 to $10 apiece, CD-RW discs a whopping $18 to $25. That's thanks in part to a royalty agreement with the recording industry, which also requires that a special "copyright flag," or signal, be embedded on blank discs and that CD recorders accept only these flagged discs. That has kept the price of recordable CDs for music artificially high; virtually identical recordable CDs for computers by contrast are relatively cheap...
...falling and CD-R blank computer discs (unburdened by copyright flags or royalties) selling for as little as a buck apiece, many computers are better equipped than home stereos to enter the digital-recording era. Even better recording technology is on its way: DVD-RAM and DVD-RW are erasable discs that can hold up to eight times as much data (or music) as CD-R discs. All this is not lost on the tech-wary music industry. "Recordable CDs have become the tool of choice for a new generation of music pirates," frets Cary Sherman, general counsel...