So instead of the commercially pressed CDs with pits, blank CDs use darkened areas of dye that gets burned into the CD. You could just embed a transparent chemical layer on to the disc that would darken when heated with a high-powered laser. The issue with such mass-produced CDs was that the three-dimensional data layer that consists of the flats and pits was permanently stamped on to the disc and there was no way to change it later.īut in the mid ’80s, scientists at Taiyo Yuden in Japan realized that you did not necessarily need the pits on the disc to diffuse the laser light. If the laser gets reflected in a flat area, the player takes it as a 1 but if the laser beam hits the pit and dims or is deflected, it is taken as a 0.
To read the disc, a CD player shines a laser along the spiral groove that is embedded in the data layer. In a regular CD, the data is stored as binary data in a series of physical pits and flats in a special layer on the disc. All this is a charm of an era gone by! How a CD is ‘Burnt’ You had to look them in the eye and hand it over, hoping that it would not be rejected.Īnd then of course, the unimaginable anxiety and anticipation as you waited with baited breath for them to listen to the songs and get back to you. Unlike a love letter back then or a custom playlist these days, you could not just slip a mix CD into someone’s bag or inbox, you had to give it to them in person. You had to write a special message with a marker on the CD or the cover.Īnd it was not just that. And you could not skip the love note either. For starters, it was the extra effort that went into making a mix CD… Selecting the right songs with the perfect lyrics to sum up what was on your mind (or in your heart), downloading the songs (having high speed internet was not as easy or common two decades ago) and of course, having the ability and the software to burn the CD. You always had a techie friend with a CD Drive who could make a mix CD for you.)Īnd it felt a lot more special than a love letter. (It was just as perfect for not-so-tech-savvy millennials too. For tech-savvy millennials in the late ’90s and early ’00s, burning a CD was the perfect substitute for a hand-written love letter.
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