What was the first CD burner? It seems like a straightforward question, but I had a hard time finding a straight answer. The first CD burner in the modern sense was released in 1991. And I think it was either Yamaha or Sony.
What the books say about the first CD burner
Books about CD recording from the 1990s generally say that Yamaha, Sony, and Phillips all released CD recorders around the same time. PC Magazine in its Oct 27, 1992 issue said Yamaha and Sony had been selling CD recorders for about a year priced around $10,000. But they didn’t give any specifics like a model number. The contenders, as best I can tell, are the Sony CDW-900E, Yamaha YPR-201, and Philips CDD521.
I was able to find evidence Philips didn’t reach the market until the first quarter of 1992. So I think either Sony or Yamaha was first.
In fairness, everyone writing on the topic in the 1990s was more interested in giving background than on creating historical record. The attitude at the time toward historical information was that it needed to be useful to be worth including. And arguably, which drive hit the market first was a lot less useful than the price and the platforms it worked with.
Why was everyone so secretive?
And I can understand why publications were so lacking in detail. CD recording was a technology almost anyone interested in computers in the early 1990s was very interested in, but it was well out of reach. The only advertisement for one of these early CD recorders I could find was from Sony, and it didn’t mention a price at all. It was very much a case of if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Mainstream publications we could get our hands on weren’t going to dedicate much editorial space to something its readership wasn’t going to be able to afford for several years.
Questions about CD burning working at retail
Working at Best Buy in 1994 and 1995, I would estimate about one customer per month asked me about CD burners. We weren’t carrying them yet when I retired my blue shirt in August 1995 to take a university IT job. But we knew HP was about to release a drive priced at $1,000, and Best Buy was at least considering carrying it.
I still remember the ensuing discussion after one customer asked me what I knew about that HP drive. Another customer spoke up and asked if it would be able to record music CDs or just computer CDs. The other customer answered before I could. He said, correctly, that you would be able to make your own music mixes. But the problem was, not everyone would want to when the blanks cost $25.
$1,000 is still a lot of money, but at that price, the type of person who shops at Best Buy could start thinking about it. But it had taken about 4 years to get there.
And let’s be fair. Regular CD-ROM drives were expensive at first too, and also took years to come down in price.
The first time I used a CD burner
I first used a CD burner later that year. By then, I was working for my college IT department, and there were a couple of drives on campus. I don’t remember what I needed to burn, but I do remember it didn’t work the first time. So I asked for help on the 2nd attempt, and they told me it happens a lot. After years of hearing about this magic called CD recording, burning a coaster on my first attempt was a letdown. But anyone who had a CD burner in the 90s will tell you that was something you got used to.
I don’t remember what kind of drive I used, but it was more likely a Phillips or Sony drive than the Yamaha. I don’t know about the Yamaha, but the Phillips and Sony drives remained on the market for several years.
What burning a CD was like in 1991
One reason prices on CD burners varied so much 1991 was because you could buy just a bare drive or you could buy a bundle included a host adapter and software for whatever computer you were going to use it with. Software was available for Unix, Mac, and MS-DOS. The PC magazines in the early 1990s warned that burning a disc at 2X might be pushing the ISA bus a little too much. But people did indeed use these drives on the ISA bus. One reviewed bundle I found included an Adaptec 1542 adapter.
The drives themselves were huge. The Yamaha drive was 19 inches wide so it fit perfectly in an audio rack. The Sony and Phillips drives were beige, so they weren’t targeting the recording industry as blatantly, but the Sony drive was rack mountable, and if the Phillips was smaller, it wasn’t by much. If you put one on your desk, it took up as much space as your computer did.
Burning a CD on a Mac provided a drag and drop experience, but on MS-DOS or Unix, you had some command line work in store. The exact commands would vary, but it would be very similar to burning a CD from the command line in Linux today.
Don’t forget the disk space!
The thing about burning a CD in 1991 was having the recorder was just part of the problem. You also had to have a large enough hard drive to temporarily hold the data you were writing to the CD. That added another thousand dollars if you didn’t have 700 megabytes laying around unused.
By mid 1994, prices were low enough to justify publishing books about the CD recording process. They tended to cover everything from the recording process on all of the major platforms, but in addition to that, they also told you what to buy if you didn’t already have a setup. This allowed them to reach the largest possible number of readers. It also made the book thicker. I know from experience that some people just bought the thickest book on the subject if there was more than one book that covered what they were looking for.
What about CD cutters?
The very first CD recorders weren’t called burners at all, and they predated the CD-R standard. These drives were called CD cutters, and they couldn’t read discs. Meridian Data and Yamaha built one in 1989 that cost $30,000. Sony followed in 1991 with a unit that cost $17,000. So if you thought the first CD burner was expensive, compared to what came before, it was a bargain.
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.