Old CD-ROMs never die, they just become unreadable

The basement cleanup continues, and I have now made my way back to the corner where I have stashed a pile of cartons full of unopened review copies of CD-ROMs.

Back in the day — which means almost a decade ago — my career as a technology & culture pundit centered on these shiny little discs that, some portion of the punditariat (most of the time not including me), thought would become a wonderful new publishing medium. Of course it didn’t turn out that way; for about two years every media company under the sun opened an electronic publishing division and scrambled to join the CD-ROM revolution. Aside from a couple of companies — Voyager was the most prominent — most CD-ROM publishing was hopelessly inept, involving the “repurposing” of old catalogs of content rather than creative use of the technology’s limited but real potential. Then everyone realized that the public was simply not buying CD-ROMs, and the bottom dropped out. Though there are some parallels to the later Internet boom, at least the Web achieved a significant presence in large numbers of people’s lives. CD-ROMs just sat on the shelves — or in basement boxes.

What’s depressing to realize today is that most of these old discs are not only not terribly interesting but, today, actually inaccessible. The software they depend on to run is no longer part of computer operating systems, or is configured in such a way that it simply won’t work with today’s systems. Some stuff still works — a lot of the simple Microsoft reference titles manage to pop open delightfully archaic Windows 3.1-style dialogue boxes. But some of my favorite titles — like Rodney Alan Greenblat’s Dazzeloids, which I reviewed in Salon’s very first issue and hoped to introduce my kids to — simply won’t play; the software gets hung up looking for an older version of Quicktime. I don’t know whether, if you buy a new copy from the successor company to Voyager that’s still selling it, that will work better. I kind of doubt it — “back catalog” software rarely gets updated to deal with changes in technology.