Caddy Confusion

Today in Tedium: The first time I ever saw a CD-ROM, I had never seen a regular CD before, and I thought that it came in a giant plastic case. To be fair to me, I was in middle school, and I had little experience with them. It was in a library, and the screen did not display anything related to multimedia, but general reference information—stuff like databases, for example. A couple of years later, I got a home computer, along with an audio CD player, and soon enough, a CD-ROM. But I always thought about that caddy, which I never saw on any of the computer equipment I owned. Why did it exist? And why, when CD-ROMs trickled down to my home, wasn’t there one? Today’s Tedium satiates my caddy-related curiosity. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s Tedium is sponsored by Quantum of Solazzo, a fellow traveler in the newsletter space. More below:

This internal drive offers part of the answer to our riddle as to why the CD-ROM caddy exists. (Derell Licht/Flickr)

Why caddies made more sense in the professional world than the consumer market

Now, I’m not the only person who has been confused by this whole caddy situation. Some of the greatest minds of my generation have been challenged by this unusual quirk of a defining multimedia tool.

For one: Benj Edwards, a pal of mine who writes about stuff like this, speculated nearly a decade ago that the reason why CD-ROMs came in caddies was because the disc media itself was expensive, costing hundreds of dollars and therefore being more valuable than it should possibly be. Which is true. We often think of CD-ROMs in terms of encyclopedias or other reference works, but it was also a useful way to store databases that may have previously only been available in file cabinets. A CD-ROM was obviously easier to transport than a pile of documents, and the convenience initially had a premium put on it so as to not discourage people from buying paper products. (Which sounds insane to write out, I know.)

I have an addition to Benj’s point, and I think it goes back to the setting where I originally saw the CD-ROM in person—a library. In a library, content is intended to be stored for long periods, and where information is not just considered in terms of accessibility but long-term permanence. If a school was likely to have a computer in 1988, where was it likely to be? A library.

As I’ve written in the past about technology often used in libraries, a key goal of information management is to ensure it sticks around a long time. (Disc rot, after all, is a thing.) And, during the early years of the CD-ROM, as I’ve already highlighted, it wasn’t immediately sold as a source for multimedia content, which it eventually became, but a way to get reference content. And reference content, especially in a library or a corporate research facility, means a different type of use than a 15-year-old sticking a Weezer CD in a CD Walkman.

Essentially, the caddy was useful back then because it ensured that the data would be handled in a secure way. And by the time caddies fell out of style, much of this information was moving to online databases or servers anyway. (Or if they did still use CDs, multi-disc readers, which were often distributed in the form of CD-ROM jukeboxes, which were intended for network distribution of content.)

But this doesn’t explain why the caddy eventually saw use in some areas specifically intended for consumers, particularly the Commodore CDTV, a multimedia-focused version of the Amiga released in the early 1990s. (If you get a chance, the retro-tinged British YouTuber RMC is currently doing a series that aims to restore a CDTV. The first episode is above.)

In that case, the 1995 book The Shape of Things to Consume: Delivering Information Technology Into the Home, which analyzed the use of multimedia technology in the home in the context of the Philips CD-i, implies that the long-term archival use cases (and the “professional” image that they portrayed) were the reason for the caddies:

The success of CD-Audio strengthened the view that CD-i should be designed to appear as a machine for home entertainment, like the CD-Audio player and the VCR, but not like the computer. Product mock-ups prepared by Philips’s industrial design centre were variations on the theme of a matte black case the size of a VCR, in keeping with the prevailing (in 1990) dominant design paradigm for audio-visual products including hi-fi. The front of the casing was to be kept as simple as possible with an LED panel and the minimum possible number of buttons. The dominant theme for the consumer is familiarity—a “natural” extension of the consumer electronics products already present in every home. This ‘matte black’ orthodoxy seemed to be as strong for the consumer product as the grey (IBM color) casing was for the professional model. The former was designed to be distanced from the image of a computer; the latter was designed to symbolize it.

The concept of the ‘professional image’ also extends to the means by which the disc is inserted into the player. Philips’s market research suggests that the shiny CD sold in a “jewel case” is a very important part of the appeal of the format to consumers, and helps to justify the price differential between CDs and vinyl discs or tapes. As with CD-Audio, the consumer will put the disc in a tray on the machine. But the professional version uses a “caddy” which transfers the disc to the machine without the disc being touched by the user. This is reckoned to protect the disc, since institutional users will not handle the discs with the same care as domestic users, but it also helps justify charging such users some 30 per cent more than mass market customers for the same product in a different case.

If anything, the authors explain in a footnote, the CDTV’s lack of success simply reinforced the idea that there wasn’t really a use case for caddies in consumer environments.

For consumer use cases, caddies were simply inconvenient, and because they cost money, people didn’t embrace the one-disc, one-caddy ethos the approach required.

“Many consumers would buy fewer caddies than discs, which then involved a fiddly process of swapping discs between caddies,” the authors wrote.

Benj Edwards speculated at one point in his piece that there may have been patent issues at play. Maybe that’s the case—though I couldn’t find anything (I did look). But one other explanation that my Google Books snippet-searching has surfaced that seems to explain the true roots of the caddy: It was a stopgap to an engineering problem.

I extracted 80 percent of an article using Google Books snippet view to help solve this mystery. Are you proud of me?

During the early history of the CD-ROM, the drives were often external, and as I pointed out before, they were massive, looking more like stereo equipment than disk drives. But here was the challenge of that: How do you fit one of these into a standard 3.5-inch drive bay? You can’t do the flip-up model, really.

Instead, you get a caddy to handle the mechanism part of things.

“Even though caddies aren’t needed for a stand-alone CD-ROM drive, they’re essential for half-height, internally mounted drives,” Zeichick wrote. And of course, this created convenience aspects as well in professional environments: “Caddies can also serve to protect discs from fingerprints and other dirt, and can even act as a pilferage deterrent.”

(As I’ve written, pilferage deterrents were also part of the reason the jewel case initially didn’t take.)

Eventually, the engineering was improved, to the point where the caddy was no longer needed. By that point, the CD-ROM no longer was limited to the library alone, but was heading for its destiny in hundreds of millions of homes.

Regular people have no time for caddies.