You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don't know how to navigate file systems, they don't know where they saved anything, they don't even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn't understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don't even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
"There's an error message on my screen."
"What does it say?"
"I don't know."
When I was a kid I had two radios.
One with a cassette player in it that had a mic built in for recording. I found it in the trash.
The other was a small FM/AM alarm clock that was dangerously hot at all times and had a noise as it was an analog clock with the little cards that flipped and the such. My opa gave it to me when he said it got too hot for his liking.
It was not long before I had figured out that if I played the radio really loud on the clock, the cassette mic would record the songs onto whatever tape you had. Be it blank, or with tape over the security gaps on the top, any tape will do.
Hardest part was the timing to start and stop the tape. And making sure you were in as close to total silence as possible as the mic picked everything up.
Even if the hot buzz of the alarm clock motor fighting to flip into the next set of minutes would make it on the tape, the recording/welfare piracy continued. It was the sneezing/siblings walking in/parents making ugly sounds that were the worst as you'd have to stop the tape, rewind to the part of the tape you were using, and wait for the radio station to play the song again, so you might be able to try and tape it again.
The back half of millennials might not have burned CDs either.
The iPod came out in 2001, my first car I played music with a cassette-tape to aux converter and a first or second Gen iPod, my second through a USB stick plugged into an aftermarket deck I bought from Walmart. Music downloaded from Limewire.
When blank 650s were $30 PER (to combat piracy) and we would sit up nights gutting and compressing the shit out of everything getting ready for a 'burn weekend'.
Burn weekends consisted of borrowing the external SCSI Burner from work ($600+) that ran at 2x but you wouldn't dare burn faster than 1x. Out of 10 discs at least 3-4 would bomb out. Fun times.
I just bought an external CD/DVD read/write. When I built my most recent PC it didn’t have external bays, and I didn’t even worry about it. Changing my tune.
I have a lot of older games on CD, music files, and movies.
The games I actually own, that can’t be randomly shut off by lack of support. Music files not tied to a streaming service. Movies I can rip and put on my own home media server.
That old tech is still useful. It’s from an age before you “rented” your music, movies (blockbuster notwithstanding), and games.
I mean I just bought a cd DVD burner. I have a ton of blank DVD and a blank cd to burn songs for my dad. It is still nice to own a physical copy of something.
I'm glad I no longer have to be concerned with Nero. But there were many alternatives after a while. This one was my favorite: https://www.imgburn.com/
I remember being the first person anyone knew who had a deck to deck burner, it was a Teac, TDK, or a Kenwood, don't remember that well. I didn't have a computer of my own at the time and was bootlegging discs for all of the people in my friends group. Everyone would bring their own spindle of blank discs and we would drink and swap discs until we either went out to go party or until everyone had copies of what they wanted. Eventually I got a few more burner decks to make things quicker, and then I sold off the extra decks to friends before moving away. Not too long after the devices were completely useless as everyone started having a burner built into their PC and just about everyone soon had a PC, still sold my last burner deck for more than I bought it for.
Only us nerds were doing it. Most people at the time I'm pretty sure had zero clue where bootlegs came from.
Oh, that was an era.
One of the things I remember most is that cheap, defective or old drives can just fuck up the burning process and now you have a useless disk of plastic you can use as a bad freesbee. I never used the fastest burn option for that reason and still had like 1\40 failed burns 'cause my drive was all cheap, defective and old. With how rarely used they are rn, the price of such failure can grow pretty quick. Some of my relatives in the 00s used them as holiday decorations, wall-mounted them on a string as they are shiny and reflective. Although cringe, it's a little better than just throwing them in a dumpster, I guess.
Me explaining minidisc to a 20 something cashier at the pawn brokers.
you had a tiny needle and a little hammer, and you would look through a jeweler's loupe to see where to carve in the 1s and the 0s. It was a golden age.
I used to rip and burn CDs all the time when I was a teenager, and in truth.... I dont know.
One year my school had a 3.5 inch floppy disk as part of the school supplies we were supposed to get. Mine was orange and you can tell a kid not to use it as a fidget toy, but they're absolutely gonna use it as a fidget toy. I don't think a single disk survived that year.
I also remember when my school got a fancy new "computer lab" that had all the colorful iMacs. There were still a few of the beige machines that read off of 7 inch floppies kicking around also.
This is fake because "burning" is a CD specific term, and no real Gen Z would know that you "burn" a CD to put music on it.
Most would probably just assume it works like a USB stick or any regular digital storage format.
It's like how a hilariously large amount of people don't know what the origin of "mixtape" is. They think its just a word that defines music mixes, because no one knows what a cassette player is anymore, or that people actually used to create and sell mixtapes.
Surprised they even know what a music CD is.
Image Transcription: Twitter Posts
alyssa, @tamaranians
Maybe its just the generation z in me but how did people burn CDs? Like how did you just get a blank CD and put songs on it?
Friendly Fat Hottie, @TeriAmour
There are people alive that don't know how to burn CDs. I'm fucking old.
They must consult the ancient tomes. Or I guess ask one of us who have.
I still have my old CD holders somewhere.
I used CloneCD. It had an icon of a sheep. Because Dolly.
I never learned to burn CD's cause I had a friend whose dad burned them for us. Not sure if that makes anyone feel old or not.
I still do it, granted I had to get an external CD drive to do so, but still. You put the blank one in and click "Burn CD" in your Zune software, it isn't that hard.
The household tower when I was young had 2 CD drives. The actual computer wasn't much, but boy, do I remember all the burning my mom had me do for her peoples
I'm Gen Z and have burned both CDs and DVDs...
I can't believe that some didn't learn it, especially growing up in the 2000s prior to the iPhone/iPad.
So we had special disk drives that basically zapped holes in a CD that played music or stored data. That's why we call it 'burning'
And get this: You didn't burn 4000 CDs. You burned one, sent it up to Sony in New Jersey, they cracked it open and then pushed it again polymer en masse to duplicate the CD. They called this "pressing."
Don't worry, even in Gen Alpha there are some people who know how to burn CDs (in theory), but probably never did, as it is not so widespread now.
May I introduce you to the concept of punching holes in floppy disks to make them writable?
Do you even know how to format a 3.5” floppy?
Are you old enough to know what a buffer underrun is?
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