On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 10:01:08AM -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > I don't know if DEC was the first to publish software on CDROM; it > certainly was fairly early.
Somewhere in my collection I have the first three BSDI releases (I was a very early customer). The first two, 0.3.3 and 0.9.1 (IIRC), came out on DC-600s. 1.0 came out on CD-ROM. Since the readers were so uncommon then, BSDI took the unusual step of including a CD-ROM reader with it. Apparently the economics were that it was going to be cheaper to do that than having to pay someone to keep manufacturing the DC-600 tapes. I still have the 5.25" SCSI-1 drive around here somewhere, complete with the little carrier tray that it required for the media. (The Sun systems of that era came with the same drive.) tl:dr; somewhere around 1991 was the inflection point :-) mcl
