Huge Half-Life discovery found from a decades-old CD sitting in a storage unit

I'm guessing he signed an NDA so I'm not sure what he was thinking distributing it so publicly.

Bravery means doing the right thing even when it's dangerous.

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don't know what burning a CD is in an article about a game older than CD burners.

Burning is writing a disc. Ripping is extracting data from a disc. Whoever wrote the article used lingo they don't understand.

Am i this old now 😂

I haven't thought about burning CDs in a long time, man that takes me back. Remember Nero Burning ROM?

I think the etymology of the term is that when you're writing data onto a disk you're shooting a laser onto it to alter the chemistry and change its color, for which "burning" the data into it makes sense.

What I ment was that bruning a disc is the secondary step to making a copy if a disc, you first need to rip the original disc into an ISO file.

I remember when we got our first CD burner, it was a black and copper colored Philips unit, it was back when you made sure to leave the computer alone when burning a CD because you you didn't want to risk buffer underrun.

Idk why.

When writing to a CD-R, the laser literally burns a chemical in the disc which causes it to change optical properties, which will cause it to appear to be the same as the pits and lands on a manufactured disc. "Burning a disc" meant to write it. It's not the original that's being burned, it's the new copy. In casual conversation someone might say "I really like this album." "Tell you what I'll burn it for you." short for "I'll burn a copy of it onto a new disc for you."

The line "Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD", in the context of "thought lost to disc rot", I would extrapolate this to mean that the original old CD was thought to be damaged or destroyed due to age or mishandling, but he was successfully able to copy the data onto a new CD. Handling or using the fragile original my cause the data to be lost, so copying it to a new disc better preserves it.

The word "rip" is usually used to mean take all the data off of a CD and store it elseways. "I ripped the CD to my hard drive." The nuance is, there isn't a new optical disc, the data just exists on a computer's internal storage. Which is probably what they actually did.

The term "burn" survived into the USB thumb drive age to differentiate writing the contents of a .iso file to a thumb drive replacing any file system or data that is currently there from simply storing a copy of the .iso among the existing file system. Often the same software you'd use for CDs would be used to image thumb drives as well so the "BURN!" button would be used to start both processes. Unlike on a CD-R nothing gets permanently altered on a USB drive.

When you burn a disc it means using a laser to etch the data as pits and lands in a track on the disc. You're physically changing the disc when you write to it.

Burning was originally used in the sense that to write to a disc you used the laser to "burn" in your data, at least irrc. It just started to be used interchangeably for copy and write operations. These days I think "rip" makes more sense.