I’ve seen a few YouTube videos where people mentioned installing CD-ROM drives in 386 or even 286 computers and getting comments about it. In this blog post, I’ll talk about whether CD ROM drives are an anachronism in a system that old.
And if you’re wondering whether a CD-ROM drive will work in a 286 or 386 PC, I can verify they absolutely do. Just load the same DOS drivers you would on a 486.
The Golden Age of CD-ROM
The Golden Age of CD-ROM titles definitely came along a generation or two after the 286 and 386, during the 486 and Pentium era. CD-ROM drives were standard equipment by the time the Pentium was mainstream, and while low-end 486s didn’t necessarily come from the factory with a CD-ROM drive, they were a very popular upgrade. Having sold computers at retail in 1994 and 1995, I would estimate at least half of the computers I sold came with CD-ROM drives. And if a day went by with me not selling a CD-ROM upgrade kit, it must have been a slow day.
You didn’t lose much by purchasing a computer without a CD-ROM drive and sound card and then adding one at a later date. I sold a good number of multimedia kits to people who had bought 486s at an earlier date. If you were buying your first computer, and a system without a CD-ROM drive cost $300 less, it could make sense to buy the less expensive computer and upgrade later. The multimedia upgrade kit might cost less in the future, but even if it didn’t, you would get a better sound card or faster CD-ROM drive if you waited.
But even though the 486 was the generation where CD ROM drives became commonplace, they were available in earlier times.
CD-ROMs in the 386 era
The first standard for multimedia PCs did not require a 486 CPU. A 16 megahertz 386sx and a single speed CD ROM drive, along with a rudimentary sound card, was enough to meet that first standard.
The second multimedia standard boosted the requirements to a 486 processor at 25 megahertz and a two-speed CD-ROM drive. This left higher end 386 systems stuck in the middle, but it was common knowledge at the time that a nice 386 could keep pace with the cheapest 486 systems. If the 386 had external cache and a fast video card, a surprising number of titles ran fine.
Of everyone I knew who owned a 386, maybe 25% had CD-ROM drives. It’s fair to say the majority of 386s didn’t end up with CD-ROM drives, but it is very much an overstatement to say nobody installed them. It came down to what they were using the computer for.
So if you have a 386 today, and installing a CD-ROM drive makes it easier for you to install software on it, or if the case simply has two open 5.25-inch drive bays and you don’t have the blanking plate for one of them, just go for it. It’s not like people in the 386 era didn’t want a CD-ROM drive.
CD-ROM drives in 286 era PCs
Installing a CD-ROM drive in a 286 generation machine is more controversial than a 386-era machine. But it also wasn’t unheard of. The very first CD-ROM drives, like the Philips CM-100 and Hitachi CDR-1503, came with interface cards that only required an 8-bit ISA slot, so they even worked on an 8088-based PC, let alone a 286. One of the biggest sellers of the early Hitachi drives was Radio Shack. They absolutely intended for you to install that card and use the CD-ROM drive with your Tandy 1000.
The early titles were generally reference titles that didn’t necessarily need graphics at all. It wasn’t at all uncommon for a business to put a CD-ROM equipped PC in its reference library area. It was faster to look things up using the computer than it was to page through dozens of books for an answer.
In 1991, a 286 PC with a CD-ROM drive and Microsoft Bookshelf was the closest thing you could get to Google. And sure, faster PCs were available by then. But if you were going to buy a faster PC, it made more sense to put that on someone’s desk and put their old PC in the common area and install the CD-ROM drive.
What CD-ROM drives are most appropriate for a 286
By the time faster CD-ROM drives were available, 286s were rather outmoded, so that generic unbranded CD-ROM drive that boldly proclaims its 50x speed doesn’t belong in a 286. An early 1X or 2x drive is really more appropriate. But the usefulness of those drives is a bit less because they generally won’t read CD-Rs.
All that said, if I had a 286 with an empty drive bay and a drive capable of reading CD-Rs that looked at first glance like the 2x drive from the same manufacturer, I’d put one in a 286.
And if I still had an external enclosure, I would totally put a SCSI CD ROM drive in an enclosure and connect it to my IBM 5170.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
By the time Windows 3.11 came along you could buy the OS on CD-ROM, and by the time Windows 95 came along it was commonplace to use one. CD-ROM copies of Linux distributions were also popular; I remember installing Slackware in 1994, though you had to create a boot floppy to install it as it was not yet possible to boot most systems from CD-ROM.
If you can’t find a period-appropriate drive, take any beige drive and put a period-appropriate sticker over the 48X or whatever. Just don’t use a more modern black drive; it will look wrong in a system from that era.
Windows 95 and NT 4.0 were the first Microsoft installations from CD-ROM; It required a boot diskette almost always on the systems of that era, and Windows 95 had a diskette-based installation initially (’95A’). I’ve never seen Windows 3.11 as a CD-based installation, where DOS is the underlying OS (for the drive in Windows, it had to also work from DOS).
Many of the computer magazines started to include CD-ROMs for Linux-based OSes and shareware programs for Windows. Some shareware gained wide distribution and cult followings. I remember “burning” the initial CD-Rs that had the foil, and were over $1 each, even in quantity – in the late 1990s.
Windows 3.1 did came in CD’s, albeit only OEM’s did this to act as a recovery disc. Some OEM’s ilke Gateway bundled Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 to one CD-ROM. And if you want to get even more specific, Traditional Chinese 3.1 came in CD-ROM though it was meant to be distributed with a new PC
I had to use an external enclosure for a SCSI CD-ROM on my PS/2 Model 30 (although it is 8086-based, the original release was in 1987 – so about the same timeframe as you are identifying here). The Trantor T130B SCSI adapter lets me use a 2Gb internal drive anyway (and I use PalmZIP for an external 100Mb Zip drive, also having changed the internal 720Kb diskette drive to 1.44Mb).
So yeah – really changing the storage abilities on the system.