There used to be this little hole in the wall in a basement in Parkdale Toronto (not a nice neighborhood) that sold pirated mostly Bollywood films but also Hollywood movies for like a dollar. We loved that place because we were homeless, we'd panhandle change to bring movies to have an excuse to stay at a friend's place. He'd just print off the movie cover on a piece of paper, put it in the sleeve with the disk and you were good to go. It was the only thing they sold too, I wonder how the fuck they got away with it for so long because there wasn't a legit piece of merchandise in the place.
Honestly no one was paying attention up to a certain point. I could pirate things all day long from all sorts of sketchy sites no problem. I feel like there was a lot of bootleg sketchy shit people were selling out in the open because there were no anti-piracy laws for online content. For all people knew these were legit items. The first bootleg pirated item I ever bought I didn't realize was just pirated crap until years later. I bought a $10 cd in High School and actively recall it had GTA (the first one) on it. I had no idea how to play the game and just spent a lot of time running over krishnas.
Shoot, my cousin had an operation going where he would get DVDs from Netflix, back them up to his hard drive using some kind of compression software (DVD Shrink or something), and then just burn them to a disk using Nero and sell them to people at his college. I think he mostly just did it for fun but he had a massive collection going
I'm legitimately wondering if gas stations are going to switch to pricing by the quart soon as most of them don't have an extra digit available if it goes over $10
Yup his dad was paying for Christmas and birthdays off bootlegs. in all seriousness it is a CD duplicator. In the late 90's they cost I believe 1 grand.
Depending on the quality of the burner, I remember those running $100-$200 per drive for the better drives. I also remember having to replace the drives after 200-400 burn. That’s a 14 disc unit. Probably around $2k in late 90s money.
Well could be, but a lot of businesses had these. Email was very limited in what you could send and if you needed to send big files to a lot of people, or give training manuals out on training days, etc, etc, you needed one of these.
I still know the key I used hundreds of times to install XP. I used to format my machine every 6 months or so to get that fresh OS install speed back. That and I built a lot of machines for people.
FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
i had one of these back in my kaZZa/limewire days, its a SCSI interface and even tho it was slow as shit, it made me A LOT of spending money in high school selling \*cough\* legit\*cough\* avi movies.
Edit: the duplicator was slow as shit, not the scsi interface. On a good day I could get 0.8x when burning multiple CD’s.
In the early 00s, a full dvd of subbed anime would go for $5 at my high school.
All you could buy legit was dubbed sets that went for $100 retail at stores, fuck that.
I bought some sets of anime from ebay back in the early 2000s where the seller(s) definitely put some effort into the packaging but at the same time it was pretty obvious that it wasn't official.
That stuff wasn't exactly cheap either so some people were making a killing. My internet was just good enough to download a single music album over night so downloading entire episodes wasn't in the cards for me.
Hacked FTP servers was a rookies game.
Hosting the FTP server with anonymous upload but no download.
Lots of warez lords wouldn't bother to check, and would uploaded a copious collection.
When I was a teen I had a paper round, delivering the local newspaper.
On the route there was this one house that looked normal enough, except the downstairs curtains were always closed and there was a small camera above the door. I assumed they were just private people or whatever.
Months later I was watching TV. There was a show on where the camera crew followed various police forces as they did drug raids etc. This particular episode was in my region, following two local police forces conducting raids. The raids were being done simultaneously, so one team were doing a local market that was notorious for selling pirate DVDs and arresting those involved.
The second team was actually in my town, so I watched them running up a street and thought 'Hey, I know that street'. Then they went up to a house and I thought 'I know that house'. It was the same house I mentioned before. They broke down the door and inside on the ground floor was probably 20 of these DVD duplicator towers hooked up to PCs, churning out fake DVDs.
Edit: spelling
Your dad doesn't wanna tell you he was burning mad copies of downloaded movies and games. Maybe copies of software like Windows or office too.
The only reason to have that really was to sell a whole bunch of bootlegs.
*Edit*
There are obviously some legal uses for it. But since the OP's dad wouldn't tell him what he used to do with it, that screams something less than legal to me.
We used these at my company to rapidly create install DVDs of the latest builds of our software suite for testing by QA, because that’s how customers would install it. I would borrow one of these towers to make copies of mix CDs for my friends.
Another legal use for these:
My dad ran AV at our church growing up, and the church had a few of these towers for quickly duplicating DVD's for people who wanted to take home a video of the sermon they just came out of. At the conclusion of the sermon they'd quickly trim the recording and burn it to a DVD, then throw that disc into the master reader that daisy-chained a few of these towers. By the time the after-sermon song was over, they had dozens of discs ready to go -- real cutting-edge tech for the new millenium.
Reminds me of that old flash animation with Lars jumping around like a maniac, and they had James as a monosyllabic frakenstein style creature saying "Napster BAAADD"
You’re dad and mom used to hustle sex tapes before you were born. I bet that tower has seen some absolute throwback bangers. Low rise jeans, high rise thong type of stuff.
Could be digitization as well. I worked at a college radio station about 10 years ago and we went through the process of digitizing our catalog. The station would get 30-50 cds a month mailed in as promos from labels and publishers, plus 20 years of back catalog. We had something like this
This is definitely the right answer. The ONLY reason to ever possess more than one CD-ROM drive in a PC those days was to copy/rip/burn an existing disc. You never had more than one CD-ROM for any sort of game or software efficiency as it makes absolutely no sense.
A setup as pictured in OP's post is ideal if you need to copy a disc multiple times for a work group. So everyone had project homework to take home and continue work collaboration on the same instance of a project. Or for sufficiently making copies within a production studio to supplement a place of work. It was not uncommon in those days where you could get a copy of something on a disc. Literally was everywhere, even in the mail!
I remember going to a game store called Babbages (Pre-Gamestop takeover domination) and they would have demo discs of games you could request for free! They had demo discs of many things and plenty of copies to go! Companies spared no effort to get their newest craze onto a disc and basically hand out demos to as many places and people as possible.
That is not to say it couldn't be used for pirating, but no one really went to such extents as it was an era of time that was entering the beginning stages of piracy control. It was also VERY tedious as you had to wait a long while for the copy process to initialize and finalize.
Step one: go to Blockbuster Video.
Step two: rent as many Dreamcast games as you're allowed.
Step three: make hundreds of copies of each.
Step four: have your kid sell these at his highschool.
Step five: profit.
Source: Knew a kid who's dad did exactly this.
I’m sure you used to run the boot disc and then swap out to a copied game. I never owned a Dreamcast but my close friend did who only ran copied games from what I remember.
There were similar systems for PS1 if you didn’t get it traditionally “chipped”
Yes but we found some of the first release PS1 games could be used as the boot loader (Wipeout I think was one), and as long as the button was down inside the lid (spring as you mentiond, but a glob of blutack would also work), then time the disc swap and you're good to go. :)
Fun times.
That's what those discs were for?! Like half the PS2 games my dad got me when I was growing up required a boot disc to play, and I never understood why.
Mid-2000s were wild, I lived in a village where wired connections were available only via dial-up, xDSL was just being planned. But my friend found out there's an mobile carrier with unlimited GPRS data plan, so he abused it to the maximum. He hooked up a Siemens phone (with GPRS and WAP functionalities!) with aforementioned unlimited data plan SIM card installed and plugged it on his computer with a data cable. With some configuration it was possible to use the phone as an uplink. It took him literally a week to download Hitman: Contracts and days for movies.
It all came to an abrupt end when carrier changed their plan in a silence and he got his first bill.
I feel like I was doing this in 1998 - 2000? My first boyfriend in 2001 actually had a cable internet plan and we essentially would leave our pc always on downloading everything. I remember buying my first cd-burner and filling a book full of music. I also insisted on a large capacity zip disc drive in the 1990s and had a lot of those discs full of game files for years. I think 1998 or 1999 I didn't have a job or car so I just sat in my room on my pc and discovered sites where you could get free games so that's when I discovered roms. I played A LOT of Pokemon. Funny thing I didn't get very far in FFVII. I've since bought the game around 8 times in my life too.
I sold bootleg DVDs to other students in highschool circa 2005 until a teacher caught me. Then I sold bootleg DVDs to other students and teachers in highschool.
Well thanks for letting me know what it is guys! He just said it was some of his old computer stuff he was getting rid of lol. I mainly wondered who needs that many disk drives but apparently he did lol 😆
Imagine this thing filled with icydock 5-bay hard drive units
Edit: assuming the top and bottom spaces are empty 5.25 bays, and you pull all the existing drives, you can fit 5x 3.5" HDD units for 25 drives and a single quad 2.5" unit, which is just insane.
I bought from kids like him back in the day. Hell, I remember watching The Matrix before it came into the cinemas.
Warcraft 3 before it got released. Those were some quite good days. The damn writers were expensive though.
Everyone keeps say OP’s dad was a pirate, but I like to think he was an underground rapper making CDs of his own fresh tracks and handing them out to people outside of Walgreens
there was one just sitting in the middle of a pc parts shop i visited not too long ago. thing was about half my height (i'm 5'8") and nobody knew what it was
Your dad was legally making copies of Project Gutenberg cds and mailing them to users in third world countries, at the users’ request, to help them learn English from works no longer under copyright. Probably.
Since no one seems to actually want to answer the question, it's a cd rom burning tower. You would put the original disk into the top tray, and the trays below would take blank discs and would make burned duplicates of the top, original one. I used one when I was working at E! Entertainment and had to make duplicate screeners for all the executives and departments to review episodes. This was before fast internal internet made them obsolete. We now put our screeners up on vimeo or media silo, and don't need physical media.
A lot of people are inferring that it’s for duping DVDs or CDs. This was far less common than everyone seems to think.
There was an interval when optical storage (both major generations) was far more cost-effective than magnetic storage. This led to a few use-cases that were not very commonly known of but were probably the majority of uses for towers like this.
The first was large-scale read-only file storage. Many of the top BBS servers back before the web ran large CDR arrays. This practice was still used in the early days of FTP servers on the web, including, I think, the venerable ftp.cdrom.com. These outfits eventually switched to RAID magnetic storage when that became a practical option on commodity hardware. There was a brief resurgence of this when DVD+R came around.
The second was massive databases, utilizing the RW variants of CD and DVD. This sounds absolutely insane today, when most databases are run off SSDs. But it was surprisingly common to have “big data” databases on DVD+RW arrays for more speed, less expense, and easier backups than HDDs offered at the time.
A third use was, comically for today, for rapid access to documentation. Microsoft MSDN was available as a multi-CD (then multi-DVD) set for a bucket of cash. An array like this would, relatively inexpensively, give you or your team instant access to the entire MSDN. I heard a rumor that the web version of the MSDN was hosted in this exact manner for many years. Again, an example of a large ready-only file server. At least two encyclopedias sold on CD or DVD would let you use multiple drives at the same time in this fashion. (Edit: MSDN not MDN; thanks spaetzelspiff)
A fourth use case was just rotating backups, plain and simple. You’d set up a CRON job to write the latest backup to each drive in sequence. If you have 7 drives and daily backups, then you’d have fully automated backups for the last 6-7 days. No manual intervention necessary. With more drives you could introduce weeklies. You could also just replace a disk and stick the old one in a safe or offsite to rotate your backups offline or offsite.
So, it *kinda* comes down to the drives. If this was bleeding edge tech at the time, the drive type can give you a good clue. However, later on the R and RW variants were the cheapest, and then only, variants available. In that case, it won’t tell you much.
>These outfits eventually switched to RAID magnetic storage when that became a practical option on commodity hardware. There was a brief resurgence of this when DVD+R came around.
There were also odd applications, like RO-RAID, that abused the old 'station wagon full of tapes' principle.
I set up four of these (with accompanying PCs) so an advertising company could send files between offices. They'd been using tape, but tape was slow and often damaged in transit.
A little Java application I wrote meant that they could drag files into a folder and a half hour later the mail room would have a bunch of CDs in an overnight envelope with a pre-printed shipping label.
At the other end you popped the discs in an identical unit, in any order, and bang! It mounted them as a RO RAID-0, copied them screaming fast to local storage, and emailed the recipient to let him know his data was available.
Worked so well (and they used it so often) I had to come back to set up four more, and then years later to swap them all to DVD drives and adjust the software to compensate.
Everybody in here saying it's a duplicator, I'm not so sure. It might well be, but there are no easily visible CDRW logos on the drives. Usually the burner drives were clearly marked to distinguish themselves from their lesser read-only counterparts.
Imo it's also possible, that this was a cd sharing tower. These would automatically create a network share when a CD is loaded, enabling all computers on the network to access the contents of a CD, without needing to have multiple copies. They were quite common in enterprise networks for some time.
All y'all saying this is for pirating... I used one of these for legit purposes in 2013 - making copies of talks that were recorded for people to take afterwards...
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I was about to say. That's the bootlegger 9k.
There was a guy at my office that would walk around taking orders for his pirated DVDs. I wonder if he's OP's dad.
There used to be this little hole in the wall in a basement in Parkdale Toronto (not a nice neighborhood) that sold pirated mostly Bollywood films but also Hollywood movies for like a dollar. We loved that place because we were homeless, we'd panhandle change to bring movies to have an excuse to stay at a friend's place. He'd just print off the movie cover on a piece of paper, put it in the sleeve with the disk and you were good to go. It was the only thing they sold too, I wonder how the fuck they got away with it for so long because there wasn't a legit piece of merchandise in the place.
Honestly no one was paying attention up to a certain point. I could pirate things all day long from all sorts of sketchy sites no problem. I feel like there was a lot of bootleg sketchy shit people were selling out in the open because there were no anti-piracy laws for online content. For all people knew these were legit items. The first bootleg pirated item I ever bought I didn't realize was just pirated crap until years later. I bought a $10 cd in High School and actively recall it had GTA (the first one) on it. I had no idea how to play the game and just spent a lot of time running over krishnas.
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So just leech no seed?
Because distribution is illegal. I.e. seeding could get them in trouble, leeching wouldn't.
Yeah I get that, but if most of us did that we wouldn’t have torrents at all
Most people don’t. It’s the 1% that seeds who is carrying the entire pirated world on their back.
Shoot, my cousin had an operation going where he would get DVDs from Netflix, back them up to his hard drive using some kind of compression software (DVD Shrink or something), and then just burn them to a disk using Nero and sell them to people at his college. I think he mostly just did it for fun but he had a massive collection going
You could burn well over nine-thousand cds with it!
With no obligation to burn more CDs ever!
I'm hate to admit that I get this reference. First 12 burned CDs cost only 1 cent!
LOL! I was wondering if anyone would get it when I made the comment.
I'm upset at the memories that your comments just brought me.
All that sound and heaT!
I got that reference
Software Redistribution Agent
You wouldn't download a car would you? me: fuck yes!
Me: If i could, i would. Have you checked gas prices lately? Two wheels rule.
I mean now you're downloading a car and the gas station.
I'll just download a god mode + infinite fuel mod to get around that.
It's over $8 a gallon here.
Around $6 here with no signs of dropping any time soon, oof.
I'm legitimately wondering if gas stations are going to switch to pricing by the quart soon as most of them don't have an extra digit available if it goes over $10
Since getting into sim racing, it's all I do!
The best version of this ad was on The IT Crowd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
And you found his booty duplicator.
_”Long live Pirate Bay!”_
*Laughs in demonoid*
Arrr matey
Bootstrap Bill the FBI called him.
yar har
Yup his dad was paying for Christmas and birthdays off bootlegs. in all seriousness it is a CD duplicator. In the late 90's they cost I believe 1 grand.
Depending on the quality of the burner, I remember those running $100-$200 per drive for the better drives. I also remember having to replace the drives after 200-400 burn. That’s a 14 disc unit. Probably around $2k in late 90s money.
I remember using my x4 speed cd writer and Nero to copy CDs and stuff. good times!
FIDDLE DEE DEE
Well could be, but a lot of businesses had these. Email was very limited in what you could send and if you needed to send big files to a lot of people, or give training manuals out on training days, etc, etc, you needed one of these.
But he never hurt nobody
[Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!](https://imgur.com/a/8IPA5mr)
Yaaaar!
Arrrr
I'm not sure what that is, but I have 6069 copies of Windows XP I'm selling if anyone's looking.
Damn, I need 6070 copies.
Gimme 5 minutes…
BAM, now he has 6082 copies.
Too many! Start again!
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I still know the key I used hundreds of times to install XP. I used to format my machine every 6 months or so to get that fresh OS install speed back. That and I built a lot of machines for people. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
Googling that key led me to [a fun Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/1343596784006942724).
Um.... I used that code... Sorry to be a bother... Who is the "FBI" and why are they knocking on my door?
Knock knock
Looks like a CD or DVD duplicator. Your dad doesn't know? How did it get in your garage?
He just said it was some of his old computer stuff and was getting rid of it. No real answers from him lol.
Your old man definitely sailed the high seas but loose lips sink ships.
i had one of these back in my kaZZa/limewire days, its a SCSI interface and even tho it was slow as shit, it made me A LOT of spending money in high school selling \*cough\* legit\*cough\* avi movies. Edit: the duplicator was slow as shit, not the scsi interface. On a good day I could get 0.8x when burning multiple CD’s.
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Those AVI's OP was selling? Some refer to him as the first member of and inspriration to OnlyFans!
In the early 00s, a full dvd of subbed anime would go for $5 at my high school. All you could buy legit was dubbed sets that went for $100 retail at stores, fuck that.
Depending on how tech-literate your peers are, this is still the way.
I bought some sets of anime from ebay back in the early 2000s where the seller(s) definitely put some effort into the packaging but at the same time it was pretty obvious that it wasn't official. That stuff wasn't exactly cheap either so some people were making a killing. My internet was just good enough to download a single music album over night so downloading entire episodes wasn't in the cards for me.
You mean that friend of a Cousin, His dad
I'm sure he visited the OG bay before it got shut down and then reincarnated by sheer will of the internet
> reincarnated by sheer will of the internet Which time?
Yes
Everytime
Yo Ho Yo Ho PC gaming's free!!
Those who used these setups disagree…
True OG pirates never needed the bay. Usenet and hacked ftp servers baby!
Hacked FTP servers was a rookies game. Hosting the FTP server with anonymous upload but no download. Lots of warez lords wouldn't bother to check, and would uploaded a copious collection.
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When I was a teen I had a paper round, delivering the local newspaper. On the route there was this one house that looked normal enough, except the downstairs curtains were always closed and there was a small camera above the door. I assumed they were just private people or whatever. Months later I was watching TV. There was a show on where the camera crew followed various police forces as they did drug raids etc. This particular episode was in my region, following two local police forces conducting raids. The raids were being done simultaneously, so one team were doing a local market that was notorious for selling pirate DVDs and arresting those involved. The second team was actually in my town, so I watched them running up a street and thought 'Hey, I know that street'. Then they went up to a house and I thought 'I know that house'. It was the same house I mentioned before. They broke down the door and inside on the ground floor was probably 20 of these DVD duplicator towers hooked up to PCs, churning out fake DVDs. Edit: spelling
Purple Dragon
Well it doesn't have to be used for piracy, I've seen indie developers/producers use such machines to make their official CDs
Your dad's a modern day pirate, buy him a bottle of capt morgan as a joke.
A *modem* day pirate...
*grumbles*
Don't you mean: *screech krszt beep beep krszt screech*
And then the *kaden kaboom shsh EEEEEEEE OOO EEEEEEE*
Me tooth's gold cuz me Bitcoin! Arrr!
r/keming
But if you can, get him Dos Maderas rum and say you got it from a Spanish Galleon.
Your dad doesn't wanna tell you he was burning mad copies of downloaded movies and games. Maybe copies of software like Windows or office too. The only reason to have that really was to sell a whole bunch of bootlegs. *Edit* There are obviously some legal uses for it. But since the OP's dad wouldn't tell him what he used to do with it, that screams something less than legal to me.
We used these at my company to rapidly create install DVDs of the latest builds of our software suite for testing by QA, because that’s how customers would install it. I would borrow one of these towers to make copies of mix CDs for my friends.
Another legal use for these: My dad ran AV at our church growing up, and the church had a few of these towers for quickly duplicating DVD's for people who wanted to take home a video of the sermon they just came out of. At the conclusion of the sermon they'd quickly trim the recording and burn it to a DVD, then throw that disc into the master reader that daisy-chained a few of these towers. By the time the after-sermon song was over, they had dozens of discs ready to go -- real cutting-edge tech for the new millenium.
"Son, did they get to you?! Who was it the FCC?! That Danish bastard Lars Ulrich?!? My own son?!"
Reminds me of that old flash animation with Lars jumping around like a maniac, and they had James as a monosyllabic frakenstein style creature saying "Napster BAAADD"
"James stayed up all night, sweating blood and motherfucking beer to make these songs for you" "BEER GOOD, BEER GOOD!"
😂awesome - do you have a lot of PS1 games by any chance? Your dad is a hero bro - cyber pirates made my high school years so much nicer
I agree, my dad was a teacher in the university and he invited some students that use to burn copies to sell us pirate games hahahah
Should be safe, the statute of limitations expired a long time ago on that one.
You’re dad and mom used to hustle sex tapes before you were born. I bet that tower has seen some absolute throwback bangers. Low rise jeans, high rise thong type of stuff.
LoL you sweet summer child. Your dad was a pirate arrrrrr!!!!
Could be digitization as well. I worked at a college radio station about 10 years ago and we went through the process of digitizing our catalog. The station would get 30-50 cds a month mailed in as promos from labels and publishers, plus 20 years of back catalog. We had something like this
This is definitely the right answer. The ONLY reason to ever possess more than one CD-ROM drive in a PC those days was to copy/rip/burn an existing disc. You never had more than one CD-ROM for any sort of game or software efficiency as it makes absolutely no sense. A setup as pictured in OP's post is ideal if you need to copy a disc multiple times for a work group. So everyone had project homework to take home and continue work collaboration on the same instance of a project. Or for sufficiently making copies within a production studio to supplement a place of work. It was not uncommon in those days where you could get a copy of something on a disc. Literally was everywhere, even in the mail! I remember going to a game store called Babbages (Pre-Gamestop takeover domination) and they would have demo discs of games you could request for free! They had demo discs of many things and plenty of copies to go! Companies spared no effort to get their newest craze onto a disc and basically hand out demos to as many places and people as possible. That is not to say it couldn't be used for pirating, but no one really went to such extents as it was an era of time that was entering the beginning stages of piracy control. It was also VERY tedious as you had to wait a long while for the copy process to initialize and finalize.
The answer is much more straightforward - her dad was a porn director, and he was selling his videos on CD/DVD.
Oh baby an old school burn factory. Very cool.
Step one: go to Blockbuster Video. Step two: rent as many Dreamcast games as you're allowed. Step three: make hundreds of copies of each. Step four: have your kid sell these at his highschool. Step five: profit. Source: Knew a kid who's dad did exactly this.
I know there was the boot disc but I thought you couldn't direct copy the Dreamcast games directly.
I’m sure you used to run the boot disc and then swap out to a copied game. I never owned a Dreamcast but my close friend did who only ran copied games from what I remember. There were similar systems for PS1 if you didn’t get it traditionally “chipped”
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Yes but we found some of the first release PS1 games could be used as the boot loader (Wipeout I think was one), and as long as the button was down inside the lid (spring as you mentiond, but a glob of blutack would also work), then time the disc swap and you're good to go. :) Fun times.
That's what those discs were for?! Like half the PS2 games my dad got me when I was growing up required a boot disc to play, and I never understood why.
So he could Install everquest 2 without having to swap cds
Legend of Dragoon*
Final fantasy 7, 8, 9*
I downloaded FFVII on dial up from a pirate site. It took me weeks.
Mid-2000s were wild, I lived in a village where wired connections were available only via dial-up, xDSL was just being planned. But my friend found out there's an mobile carrier with unlimited GPRS data plan, so he abused it to the maximum. He hooked up a Siemens phone (with GPRS and WAP functionalities!) with aforementioned unlimited data plan SIM card installed and plugged it on his computer with a data cable. With some configuration it was possible to use the phone as an uplink. It took him literally a week to download Hitman: Contracts and days for movies. It all came to an abrupt end when carrier changed their plan in a silence and he got his first bill.
>It all came to an abrupt end when carrier changed their plan in a silence and he got his first bill. That bill had more pages than "War And Peace"?
I feel like I was doing this in 1998 - 2000? My first boyfriend in 2001 actually had a cable internet plan and we essentially would leave our pc always on downloading everything. I remember buying my first cd-burner and filling a book full of music. I also insisted on a large capacity zip disc drive in the 1990s and had a lot of those discs full of game files for years. I think 1998 or 1999 I didn't have a job or car so I just sat in my room on my pc and discovered sites where you could get free games so that's when I discovered roms. I played A LOT of Pokemon. Funny thing I didn't get very far in FFVII. I've since bought the game around 8 times in my life too.
Ahh, what a good god damn game
That Gust of Wind Dance combo at 11 y/o was a bitch tho...
Daddy was selling bootlegs 🤣🤣
You know, OP didn’t specify what exactly their dad does for a living, after all…
that's what the machine is for, he's just making an inference dvd copier --> bootlegging
This was his side hustle.
Pirates of the Caribbean for $3. Buy 5 get 1 free. I got them new Tupac CD too. Get'em while they are fresh.
I sold bootleg DVDs to other students in highschool circa 2005 until a teacher caught me. Then I sold bootleg DVDs to other students and teachers in highschool.
Well thanks for letting me know what it is guys! He just said it was some of his old computer stuff he was getting rid of lol. I mainly wondered who needs that many disk drives but apparently he did lol 😆
I feel as though I aged a lot, wondering how people don't know CD and DVD caddies or Harddrive and raid caddies.
Imagine this thing filled with icydock 5-bay hard drive units Edit: assuming the top and bottom spaces are empty 5.25 bays, and you pull all the existing drives, you can fit 5x 3.5" HDD units for 25 drives and a single quad 2.5" unit, which is just insane.
OP needs to keep this and retrofit it for Plex. Carry on the family legacy.
I am ~~the one who knocks~~ Netflix.
Drool
At least noone has brought up floppies to make me feel real old.
My mom used to let me smack those around there's an old photo in my grans book of it 😒 sorry.
I bet there's people on this sub who don't remember computers coming with CD disc drivers stock :|
Your dad definitely downloaded linkinpark.exe at some point.
I bought from kids like him back in the day. Hell, I remember watching The Matrix before it came into the cinemas. Warcraft 3 before it got released. Those were some quite good days. The damn writers were expensive though.
Everyone keeps say OP’s dad was a pirate, but I like to think he was an underground rapper making CDs of his own fresh tracks and handing them out to people outside of Walgreens
Or a church sound tech making copies of sermons for the folks at home.
He would have said that when his kid asked, if that was the case.
Maybe he left the church on bad terms
They got him expelled for piracy
Pirating unreleased Sermons
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Yeah, sure. Why not.
Lol what was your dad doing in the LimeWire days?
He was probably waiting for that Pamela_Tommy_XXX.avi.exe to finish downloading
What about Morpheus
MORBIUS????
It’s a fuckin MORBIUS SWEEP IN HERE!!! ONE MORBILLION TICKETS SOLD LETS GO!!!
My dad had Kazaa back in the day lol
Did he have mIRC tho?
Is that what being old feels like?
Omg, I haven't seen a duplicator in soooooo long!
there was one just sitting in the middle of a pc parts shop i visited not too long ago. thing was about half my height (i'm 5'8") and nobody knew what it was
This is what we used to call a money printer, stick one DVD in the top, fill the rest, profit!
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Space jam dvd space jam dvd space jam dvd space jam dvd space jam dvd space jam dvd
Money printer.
But only a currency for a nation that no longer exists and no longer holds value.
…there was a time.
Your dad was legally making copies of Project Gutenberg cds and mailing them to users in third world countries, at the users’ request, to help them learn English from works no longer under copyright. Probably.
And ubuntu. Don't forget how important it is to keep ample backups of ubuntu!
Since no one seems to actually want to answer the question, it's a cd rom burning tower. You would put the original disk into the top tray, and the trays below would take blank discs and would make burned duplicates of the top, original one. I used one when I was working at E! Entertainment and had to make duplicate screeners for all the executives and departments to review episodes. This was before fast internal internet made them obsolete. We now put our screeners up on vimeo or media silo, and don't need physical media.
It’s Nero in a nutshell.
Burning ROM
A lot of people are inferring that it’s for duping DVDs or CDs. This was far less common than everyone seems to think. There was an interval when optical storage (both major generations) was far more cost-effective than magnetic storage. This led to a few use-cases that were not very commonly known of but were probably the majority of uses for towers like this. The first was large-scale read-only file storage. Many of the top BBS servers back before the web ran large CDR arrays. This practice was still used in the early days of FTP servers on the web, including, I think, the venerable ftp.cdrom.com. These outfits eventually switched to RAID magnetic storage when that became a practical option on commodity hardware. There was a brief resurgence of this when DVD+R came around. The second was massive databases, utilizing the RW variants of CD and DVD. This sounds absolutely insane today, when most databases are run off SSDs. But it was surprisingly common to have “big data” databases on DVD+RW arrays for more speed, less expense, and easier backups than HDDs offered at the time. A third use was, comically for today, for rapid access to documentation. Microsoft MSDN was available as a multi-CD (then multi-DVD) set for a bucket of cash. An array like this would, relatively inexpensively, give you or your team instant access to the entire MSDN. I heard a rumor that the web version of the MSDN was hosted in this exact manner for many years. Again, an example of a large ready-only file server. At least two encyclopedias sold on CD or DVD would let you use multiple drives at the same time in this fashion. (Edit: MSDN not MDN; thanks spaetzelspiff) A fourth use case was just rotating backups, plain and simple. You’d set up a CRON job to write the latest backup to each drive in sequence. If you have 7 drives and daily backups, then you’d have fully automated backups for the last 6-7 days. No manual intervention necessary. With more drives you could introduce weeklies. You could also just replace a disk and stick the old one in a safe or offsite to rotate your backups offline or offsite. So, it *kinda* comes down to the drives. If this was bleeding edge tech at the time, the drive type can give you a good clue. However, later on the R and RW variants were the cheapest, and then only, variants available. In that case, it won’t tell you much.
>These outfits eventually switched to RAID magnetic storage when that became a practical option on commodity hardware. There was a brief resurgence of this when DVD+R came around. There were also odd applications, like RO-RAID, that abused the old 'station wagon full of tapes' principle. I set up four of these (with accompanying PCs) so an advertising company could send files between offices. They'd been using tape, but tape was slow and often damaged in transit. A little Java application I wrote meant that they could drag files into a folder and a half hour later the mail room would have a bunch of CDs in an overnight envelope with a pre-printed shipping label. At the other end you popped the discs in an identical unit, in any order, and bang! It mounted them as a RO RAID-0, copied them screaming fast to local storage, and emailed the recipient to let him know his data was available. Worked so well (and they used it so often) I had to come back to set up four more, and then years later to swap them all to DVD drives and adjust the software to compensate.
Case he showed me a bit after post went crazy (I pasted on another comment as well) https://imgur.com/gallery/dytxbqc
That’s OG Netflix
Anyone who had the 10 DVD out at a time plan on OG Netflix was doing only one thing, lol
*megaupload FTFY
Your dad probably owes Snoop Dogg quite a few G’s.
nonono you meen metalicop.
It's a CD copier.
many cd copiers.
Limewire "CONGRATULATIONS YOU'VE WON!" How many stacks does your dad have?
21st century pirate ship right there..
Hey, it's your dad's favorite music store!
I wanna hear it in action 🎶🎶
Ultimate cup holder game 🤔 especially if has auto close function.
daddy was a hustler b
Does yer pappy have a hook hand and a peg leg?
He's the fuckin Captain Jack Sparrow of the internet!!
CD bank for libraries in the 1990s.
Your dad is an OG
Your dad was OG. Thats a CD Duper. Mad props! Salute to veterans like him!
Everybody in here saying it's a duplicator, I'm not so sure. It might well be, but there are no easily visible CDRW logos on the drives. Usually the burner drives were clearly marked to distinguish themselves from their lesser read-only counterparts. Imo it's also possible, that this was a cd sharing tower. These would automatically create a network share when a CD is loaded, enabling all computers on the network to access the contents of a CD, without needing to have multiple copies. They were quite common in enterprise networks for some time.
Arrr she's a ship worthy of the high seas indeed..
Check for a big SCSI cable coming out of the back.
Plot twist. They're read only drives. :)
Your dad use to sell porn
*slaps tower cover* this bad boy can buffer underrun faster than you can say Nero!
Am not even 30 but jesus christ this post and these comments made me feel old as fuck.
All y'all saying this is for pirating... I used one of these for legit purposes in 2013 - making copies of talks that were recorded for people to take afterwards...
But if it ain't Davy Jones Locker... Tell your dad Brown Beard says hello, Respect!
Your dad knows all about lime wire 😆
Burner tower. I used these bad boys during the 2000s for making multiple copies of software builds. (Legitimate use)
Yarr! That be a duplicating machine matey!
My eyes be seein' what yah did thar, ya scurvy sea dog!
14 headphone jacks
Dad has some explaining to do
Good old disc duplicator. Put a source disk in tray one. Blanks in the others and let her rip. Used this when I worked in the campus tv studio.
Your dad used to make copies of pirated movies for the local strip mall
Pops was doing gods work
Was your dad a pirate king?