First CD-ROM drive: Philips CM-100

Last Updated on May 31, 2024 by Dave Farquhar

The first CD-ROM drive is generally credited as the Philips CM-100, a product announced in 1985 for the IBM PC/XT. It cost $1,495 when it was new and its requirements were straightforward: An IBM PC/XT with 256K of RAM and an available ISA slot. And people did indeed use these drives with XT class machines. 286 PCS were still relatively uncommon in 1986.

The Philips CM-100 CD-ROM drive

The Philips CM-100 drive is rare, but the interface card is even more rare. Very little in the way of standards existed yet, including the ways to connect the drives. Philips called its interface LMSI. When these drives went out of service and into storage, the owner frequently forgot to remove the interface card from the computer and store the interface card with the drive. The interface card is called an LM-153, and fortunately, a modern clone exists.

But as ancient as this drive is, with a compatible driver, the drive works with MSCDEX just like any other DOS compatible CD-ROM drive. All the hooks DOS used in the 90s were there in 1985.

The drive was external. Although the drive mechanism itself looks like it could fit in a 5.25-inch enclosure, the electronics will not. When Infoworld reviewed it, the reviewer said the Phillips CM-100 took up nearly as much desk space as a dot-matrix printer did. If that reference doesn’t mean much to you, that’s slightly bigger than a modern desktop PC. The disc loads from the top of the unit, so you couldn’t put it under the monitor and you had to be careful about stacking anything on top of it.

What critics said about the first CD-ROM drive

The Infoworld review published March 31, 1986 was mostly positive, with the main complaint being about the documentation and lack of standardization, which is a common problem/complaint with new technology in its early stages. When Compute reviewed it in its May 1986 issue, they didn’t talk much about the drive at all. The review spent most of its time talking about the software bundled with the drive, and explaining the idea of having 600 MB of storage on a single disc. In 1986, this was a tremendous amount of storage. The standard sizes for computer hard drives at that time ranged from 10 to 40 megabytes. Having 15 times as much storage available seemed like living in the future.

One other thing the reviews noted was that the CM-100 could not play or read audio CDs. We take that capability for granted now, but that wasn’t possible at first.

The drive was slow too. It only transferred data at a rate of 150 KB per second. Yes, that’s kilobytes per second. That speed retroactively came to be known as 1X. A late model CD-ROM drive with a 52X or 56X rating really did spin the disc more than 50 times as fast.

As for the seek time, it was 1-2 seconds. Yes, it was measured in seconds. We’ve come a long way.

Uses for a CD-ROM drive in the 1980s

Living in the future was expensive too. One of the few mentions I found about the Phillips CM-100 when it was still on the market was in a roundup of CD-ROM software in the January 31, 1989 issue of PC Magazine. It listed about 10 different titles, and it also noted which drives each title was compatible with. Not all of the titles worked with every drive on the market, although the CM-100, being first, did work with all of the titles. The price of the titles ranged from $295 to $1095. The titles were generally reference titles, taking advantage of the storage capability to store the full text of very large reference works and to make it easy for researchers to look up information quickly a decade before basic information was freely available over the Internet. I think a lot of people know the first CD burners were expensive, but early CD-ROM was really expensive too.

The Phillips CM-100 is largely a curiosity today. If it comes as a surprise to you that CD-ROM drives were available in 1985, I’m not surprised. They were very much a niche product until prices came down. I knew what a CD-ROM drive was in the 1980s, because I read every computer magazine I could get my hands on. But the first time I saw one in person was in 1989 or 1990. It was in a library, and they used it for reference material. It was faster than looking the same things up in the paper copies of the same books. The first time I used one personally was probably in 1990.

When CD-ROM drives became common

It was around 1991 that it became possible to get a CD-ROM drive for around $300. At that price point, consumer interest started to pick up and consumer-oriented titles started to appear. These early drives weren’t much faster than the first drive, still transferring at 150 kb per second. The seek time may have been a bit faster. But they did have the ability to read and play back CD audio. That capability quickly became important. Multimedia depended on it. This is why I don’t get upset when I see a CD-ROM in a 286 or 386. Contrary to what some people say, they aren’t anachronistic in PCs of that period.

The first CD-ROM drive isn’t something many people are likely to have seen in person. Even fewer saw one or used a Philips CM-100 when it was new. The drives that came after were better in pretty much every way. The standards were formalized, so there wasn’t any guesswork about what software worked with what drives. And they took up a lot less space, eventually fitting internally. But the CM-100 was the pioneer that blazed the trail for whatever CD-ROM drive you use in your retro PC today.

Dave Farquhar

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.