Charles Wheeler <charles_d._wheeler@dbug.org> writes:

Your end of the year report in TidBITS-257 neglected to mention that 1994 was finally the year CD-ROM gained mass acceptance after years of trying. (Even I, the self proclaimed archenemy of CD-ROM technology, bought a drive last year.) What changed in 1994 was not the technology or people's perceptions of it, but prices and, most important, content. Led by Myst and assisted by the Microsoft Home series, there now exist CD-ROMs worth owning. My personal favorites include Simon & Schuster's Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual (introducing QuickTime VR) [see TidBITS-250], Now What Software's Real World Picture Atlas and The Cities Below, Microsoft's Cinemania '95, and the excellent interactive version of David Macaulay's best selling book The Way Things Work. These products, along with other high quality, high content offerings, make putting up with the speed limitations of the technology worthwhile. (I was told at Macworld San Francisco that someone was showing a 15x drive with 40 millisecond access times, so maybe that liability will soon be gone.)