this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Because they sucked. They hit a very brief moment of being bigger than floppies and not as expensive as another hard disk, but they broke all the time, lost data, were expensive, and CD burning came along and got cheap real fast.
CDRW was never as well supported by the filesystem though. I think it was well into the 2000s before windows had a native "burn to disk" option in the filesystem browser. Before that you needed to fuss with third party software and select the correct disk type and drive speed and all that.
Oh yeah, I forgot about all that stuff you had to set up right to burn a cd and not turn it into a coaster. And the different configuration you would have to set up whether you wanted it to play like a music CD to go in the car or just files in mp3 format, which some car stereos would read correctly. I would never know how to do something like that now.
I loved em when they were the only option and the rewriteability meant I used them well into the burning age. I actually used their larger capacity competitor though that was a real brief thing.