I will be on my way to my storage room shortly to look for stragglers, but apart from whatever I may find there, this afternoon I finished transferring any and all audio or video data that I had on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and BD-Rs to a parallel pair of hard drives. It amounts to some 2.67 TB.
This marks the end of a ~25-year phase in which those discs embodied much of my personal history. With very few exceptions I've been disposing of the discs as I went along. It's strange to have just a few dozen special personal items left. Actually, toward the end of the process I was more and more glad to be rid of the damn things.
I felt the urge to "share" about this milestone, and this is the place where I think it will best be understood.
(Actually I was trying to figure out when I started recording on CDs; I think it must have been around 1995 or 96. My first recorder was a Philips CDD-522 external SCSI unit (
http://www.hughsnews.ca/philips%E2%80%99-cdd522-is-evolution-not-revolution-0055892) rebranded as "Smart and Friendly"--it cost about $2400 as I recall, and blank discs, which were available at first only in 63-minute (550 MB) capacity, cost around $20 to $25 each when you could get them, which wasn't always. That recorder was a big forward step from the first-generation recorders, which failed at least half the time, ran at 1x speed only, and the blank discs cost $75. They had one of those at the company where I was working back then; it was made by Yamaha and I don't know what it cost, but it was several thousand dollars for sure.)
Next, the cassettes ...
--best regards
Edited later to add: At my storage rooms I found another large carton of recorded discs, so my posting (and all those feelings) was/were two or three days too soon. It's OK; that'll be one large carton fewer, and one large carton closer to the day when I can combine everything from three storage rooms into "only" two.