Q: why did we use caddies and why did we stop? A: We don’t know and couldn’t find anyone who did know, but we have a lot of guesses.

Only time I used "Caddys" was on the schools brand spanking new CD-ROM PC and I can see why they used caddys there, they were roughly handled (by staff and students) and I am sure that expensive copy of Encarta would have been scratched to buggery within the first week. I think that's the main reason, just to protect the disc for school/business environments and when the CD came home it was easier to try to use the caddy system to allow people to protect at home. But as you say in the video the price of discs dropped quite a fair bit making the need for caddys obsolete.

From what I remember, CD Caddies where pretty much there at the beginning of the Data CD, which was NOT considered or used as a consumer media. It was used for many applications in the business, scientific and commercial worlds however. Yes, the discs were typically expensive, and difficult to replace if something happened to them. It only made sense to design the use of them to be protected, which the caddies did quite well. The intent was indeed to place the DATA CD (CD-ROM) in the caddy and never remove it until a newer disc was released to replace it, such as newer release version of an automotive parts catalog. I remember when buying my first computer CD drives, that I specifically searched for the higher end, more expensive CADDY units, even though by then the tray versions were readily available. I still have a very nice SCSI Yamaha 4X burner with a caddy. Even years after the typical CD-ROM drives were no longer using caddies, DVD-RAM drives still were available with Caddies! They typical use cases of many DVD-RAM users, still demanded the extra safety afforded by the caddies.

Wait... The question isn’t answered in the video? I was flabbergasted with caddies when they came out. Couldn’t understand why the diskman didn’t need one, but the computer did... It made sense when the CDRAM disks came in the caddy... but nothing else made sense, and I was happy when 2 and 4x drives came out with trays, or slots even.

I always thought it was for cost reasons. It's cheaper to produce a CD ROM drive without tray mechanisms and motors.

DVD-RAM discs were still using caddies in the early 2000s.

Someone was asking about 3.5" Disk Drives today on Lemon, and I think it kind of answers your question, in a roundabout way. Basically you were right, they were used to prevent dust and jam and hair, and finger-prints on the CDs. I remember the ads on Tomorrows World where they said CDs were unbreakable, and they were hitting them with hammers. "The disk drive heads float a few microns above the disk, and are like metal clips above and below. Back in the day, most disk head 'cleaners' used a hard type of material, which scratched the surface like sandpaper. Really the heads only need a very fine wipe, and the best head cleaners use clear tape and an alcohol/nail varnish remover-type liquid, very much like a VCR head cleaner. Particles of dirt on the disks cant be cleaned unfortunately. Its made worse because when the disk spins up, this creates a small vacuum, and air rushes in through the gaps around the disk drive door, right onto the open hole of the spinning disk. This was an issue with early CD-roms to some degree, and lead to some drives needing the discs inserted in their own cases, to limit damage to the laser read head, and avoid dust bouncing around in a vortex under the spinning discs. Today, CDs are often inserted between two filters, which wipe away the surface dust and stop the vacuum effect, as the disc spins. Sorry to go off topic."

My grade school had old computers(grade schools always use computers 30 years past what home users have them for) and all but 3 caddies in the library and 5 in the computer lab were long gone so the librarian or a teacher were the only ones that were allowed to handle them. It was crazy because at home we had a old computer with a CD-ROM with a tray AND it was a burner. My school district had a huge upgrade when I was in Jr. High and all the caddies just went in the trash, all those years thinking they were really expensive and seeing them in the trash was a little weird. I felt like digging them out of the trash but never did.

Why did we REMOVE Caddies? Thats the better question

First CDs were 650MB not 700MB.

Hey it's pretty nice to see you still around! I remember you from all the Amiga videos and all, nice video too it's something I wondered a lot!

When I was in school. The it class had a tower system consisting of a 50mhz SLC 486, 8mb Ram, and 6 cdrom drives that used caddies. Caddies were used in school as discs would get scratched rather easily.

I still use a caddy SCSI drive on my Acorn A4000. Interestingly the CDROM drive has a built in brush to clean the lens!

Blu-ray (ish) disc still use cady in the form of XDCAM cartridges.

I came here because I'm looking for these very weird CD-i caddies. Where you would insert the caddy and the drive would eat the disc out of the caddy. Leaving you with an empty caddy. If you wanted to get the disc out, you'd have to re-insert the caddy and the disc would be back in it. These caddies were also a lot thinner then the ones shown in this video. This memory is from when I was 4-5 years old. 33 now.

I loved caddy drives.. It would be fantastic to retrofit a blu ray player inside. For weirdos like me anyway.

I never even knew this was a thing. Thanks for the knowledge.

I had that Pioneer CD rom changer you briefly can see at the beginning! Not a caddy per se, rather a cassette for 6 CD roms. Used it for sharing files at my BBS.

This passed me by, and I am so happy it did!

I remember the caddy system in the CDTV. A system I craved to own back then but with a price tag way outa my wage bracket, I was a big Amiga fan and when I saw the full CDTV setup with its all black style and CD drive I fell in love. I never did own one :( You got one for a Xmas gift! ya jammy little bugger Dan ;)

I am by far the techie and retro tech lover in my family and group of friends. I never even knew this existed! Great stuff!!! Thank you for this history lesson!!!

Thanks, an interesting video! It's funny that people complain that you didn't answer the question, You provided the best theories based on research.

I recall that my first pc back in 94 was lacking the “media kit” which was the sound card and the cd rom because they were massively expensive

I remember using caddies all the time with family members PCs in the 90s. And in 2011 I went to a used book store and found a mint condition box of Kong’s Quest VI. When I got the box home and opened it I found the original sales receipt for Day of the Tentacle, and a return/exchange slip showing the owner traded it back in for King’s Quest VI. There was a letter from LucasArts tech support with ideas for fixing audio issues with Day of the Tentacle. Finally, the disc was in a caddie. And it appears to have never been removed as it is pristine. Very awesome find and the reason I searched for and found your video. Thanks for an awesome vid!

Pure magic! I love all this kind of stuff. Questions like "Can you use a HD floppy as a DD floppy', and 'how do Zip drives work'. All cutting edge stuff. :)

Huh. I didn't make the connection between floppy discs and minidiscs/umd until this video Mini discs were awesome. Great video Dan!

Oh, yes - my first CD drives at work used caddies. This was about '89 or '90 or so, when I was running a software QA lab and needed to load images of specific software and network configurations on the lab stations for test runs. I also had the only CD burner in the company in my office - at the time, it was about $7000. Caddies were a pain to use, but it was still less potentially problematic and expensive than my previous solution, which was to set everything up with swappable drive bays and maintain a library of test environment hard drives... which were, of course, mounted in their own versions of "caddies". Fragile, expensive, and bulky vs. cheap and easily replaceable justified the expense of the burner and a handful of external CD drives. And yes, I would occasionally take the burner home on weekends and use it to backup my home systems onto CDs... only one of my friends to have CD backup for several years. :-)

Dan, you and ravi has the best show!

Just just picked up that exact AppleCD player you have in your video

I worked at a multimedia software company, and our CD duplication setup used caddies. It was a custom system that had three CD-R SCSI drives (each on it's own 8-bit SCSI card); we'd read the disk to be copied to the HDD in the machine, then tell the system whether we needed 1, 2 or 3 copies, and it could write all three at once on the blazingly-fast 4x CD burners. No monitor or keyboard, you selected your options on a 2-line LCD panel. Oh, and it was 650MB disks, and only later on did we actually get 700MB blanks (at $20 each). We used the 700MB disks for building masters for our encyclopedia/dictionary/thesaurus/etc product.

Okay KZfaq I watched the caddy video. I always wondered about why it was required. My first CD ROM drive was a 4x creative and sb16 for my 486 dx2 66. We used caddys at school though, hated them. Another great video! Thanks.

Hi Dan, great vid. Sorry I missed you at the Amiga convention in Athlone. I should have been there as I live 10 mins from Athlone but alas I was ill. Enjoyed the vid you did on it it. Anyway thanks for this vid, reminded me of my CDTV. Oh how I wish I still had it! Oh the regrets😁

Nice video. I remember i was the envy of my street, as my older brother got me the hard drive for the Amiga 1200. High end gaming PC owner these days but i do miss the old days. Just walking into a shop and asking for a box of 50 blank floppys was legend (Xcopy) cough ha ha

Aside from the PSP, yes I do have experience with CD caddies. It was with Kid Pix on Windows 95, with a PC that had four disk drives (two 5.75"/one 3.5"/one CD-ROM) as well as a 2.65 GB HDD; the CD-ROM drive required the use of a CD caddy. At the time, I had no other experience with the compact disc format so I had no point of reference, so...yeah. Looking back at it now, only inconvenience I recall was the caddies sometimes sticking due to the terminal being used a lot and running fourteen hours a day minimum. I never had to swap the disc or anything though.

Ya know it wasn't the CD-ROM that blew my mind, at the time computer CDs were becoming a big whoop I was working at a PC shop running a dual Celeron 300a OCed to nearly 550Mhz set up with a whopping 20gb of storage attached (Anybody remember those old Tyan dual socket boards? Ahh being able to multicore in the 90s, good times) but what blew me away and caused me to spend WAAAY too much money was the first burners! Being able to store 650Mb of data at a time when the biggest portable storage was a 100Mb Zip disk? Sign me up! I ended up spending nearly $300 on one of the first CD burners followed by nearly the same amount for one of the first DVD burners a few years later. I actually still have a couple of CD/RWs and a DVD/RW from that time period and amazingly they still read after all these years. Now everyone is moving away from discs but I still have a DVD Burner (A Lightscribe one, I miss Lightscribe) and a Bluray burner in my gamer box and as long as i can get media I'll keep them around, having a hared copy of my data off my PC still makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Great video. I have some old caddy drives, one of which is an external writer. I must see if it actually still works. I didn't know of those studio players using them. One thing though: The original capacity was 640MB.

I had a SCSI CD-ROM that used a caddy, I had it cos a friends dad gave me some old SCSI stuff which was obsolete by that point. The caddy was a faff, and the opening tabs were prone to snapping off if you dropped it. The drive didn't have a faceplate so it was a bit cyberpunky (in my head at least). I also remember having an external tape drive I never used to terminate it which one night when I was in bed decided to catch fire...

Great stuff as always Dan. Oddly I'm one that doesn't recall using or needing a caddy at all. And yep I was one who added an early 2x speed cd rom to my 486 as an upgrade.

I love old electronics and few day ago I purchased working cd-rom drive from 1993 with caddy. 1x speed, connected by SCSI controller. It works perfectly in my retro Dos computer. It even opens CDs recorded by new dvd-rom without any problems.

I got a ThinkPad 755CSE recently with the Selectadock II from 1994/95, and when I went to use the CD-ROM drive on the dock, I wasn't expecting a caddy to pop out because I'd never even heard of something like that lol. I also find it cool that you worked at a radio station in the late 90s... there's a small radio station & studio that I've been volunteering at since the very beginning of 2018.

Cool video! :)

I remember at school we mostly had BBC micros, even in secondary school. Though in the library there were a few acorn A3010s which were on a network, attached to a caddy CDROM so we could use the various encyclopedias and multimedia discs, though they were very different to the types of things available today!

I remember these. Only used one in my CDTV, like you say Dan the spare caddies were expensive - almost the price of a floppy based game.

I still have a CDTV under the TV, was nice to see the A570 briefly pop up.

❤️❤️ for the minidisc reference! 😁

I always figured it was the mechanisms of the time or the coating that protects the data. Heck for a while i heard that Blu-rays were supposed to come in caddies because of how scratch-prone they were.

My memory says Sony wanted all disks sold in a caddy that couldn’t be removed, but Phillips didn’t want the extra cost in the standard, and the reusable caddy was a compromise that didn’t take off with consumers. Sony formats like MiniDisk and UMD backup my memory, though I wish I could remember a source to confirm my memory...

Always loved the caddies on these.

I remember *seeing* caddy-based drives, but I never owned one. I do however still have my old 4x speed cd changer drive (5 disks in a single height drive!)

thank you, I was researching for an analysis of a video game called signalis which is a sci-fi horror game that has 80s like tech. In-game there is a blue disk that looks like a floppy and a lot of people immediately thinks is a floppy but looking at it in detail is actually a optical disk in a caddy

Hi Dan. Never used them in the computer setting but a 1989 car I still own had a factory cd player which used caddies for audio cds. It was a Blaupunkt unit (but branded BMW).

I remember my first cd drive for my A2000 was a Plextor 2x with a caddy. At that point tray versions were available but all I could afford at the time was the used Plextor. The tray was a pain but I was excited to even have a cd drive so it didn’t matter. Lol

The music department in my secondary school had an Apple based computer that had a CD-ROM that used a caddy system, this was the late ninties and I can remember what model of Mac it was, but I thought it was strange that this was the only computer I had seen that used caddys as all the other computers in the school used a regular tray loader.

I remember early Apple CD drives being caddies, even the one on the Quadra. There was a few basically "CD-ROM Discmans" which were portable CD players with a SCSI port that could also be used as a CD-ROM drive. There was the Apple PowerCD which allowed viewing photos on the TV as well with a remote control (pretty cool looking device as well). I have a Pinnacle Micro RCD-1000 from March 1995 that is a caddy load CD *Burner*. I can't seem to get it to work, but I remember drooling over it in a computer catalog at the time and it was about $2,000.

I used these well into the early 2000s(in professional studio environments) - for both protecting the media of expensive software as well as convenient storage of stock library(audio/video/graphics) discs.

Yes I did it was either that NEC cd rom dr be at the end of this video or a similar model from NEC. It was a novelty at first but became quite tiring soon after :) it was a SCSI drive that I used on my Amiga 1200, used to love exploring the Aminet CDs -- I still have them in fact!

I used the NEC CD Caddy Drives like those that appeared at the end of the video. I was running OS/2 at the time and SCSI was well supported via the controller makers for that OS. Thus I used those SCSI NEC drives until I finally gave up on OS/2 around 2006.

My first experience with CD-ROM caddies was in the late 1980s, when the library my parents worked at acquired some CD-ROM systems. The drives were large external pizza-box Hitachi units with proprietary interface cards (I thought they might be SCSI, but apparently not). I don't remember if the discs in the collection were stored in caddies, but as you say in the video, it would make sense that users wouldn't handle the costly discs directly. I actually picked up one of the drives when they were decommissioned and used it as my bedside music CD player for a time - the drives had a headphone output and with the right DIP switch setting it would auto-play a CD-DA when inserted. No transport buttons, so I had to listen all the way through!

Had no idea caddy's were used thank you for video

Despite the reactions from below, i found this video very interesting. And the answer to the question was given in this video: to protect precious cd's and maybe a patent matter. My experience with these caddies is the use of magneto optical drives for audio postproduction. The media within was fixed, so you couldn't swap. It was just a protactive case, like MiniDisk. And just recently, collegue cameramen were using these caddy disks for recording their material. Nowadays, fixed media like memorycards are taking over. I like the look of those caddy's, though!

A Cd-rom drive on a XT PC, that is insane lol. My first experience with a cd-rom drive was in the early 90's. Single speed, that had to be pushed in, and then pulled out by hand. it had a lid, that opened 'automatically'. Cd-rom in, lid closed, pushed back in, and it was ready. My dad worked for Ahold, an umbrella supermarket concern now better known as Albert Heijn in the netherlands, on the IT department.. He was allowed to take home all the obsolete server hardware that got replaced, so every single piece of hardware (mainly storage hardware, like HUGE HDD's in MB's for the time, tape drives, SCSI ISA cards to connect it) got tested in our poor 80386SX machine we got at home.. A lot of the hardware wasnt compatible, but some of the SCSI HDD's and tape drives were.. Alot of fighting with available resources (IRQ, DMA, etc) but man it was awesome..

My first cd recorder (for tv) had caddies for recording on.. infact that was how you got them when you paid for extra discs.

I remember using caddies in the library and computer lab in elementary school and junior high for a short time or the odd "older" system. I wondered why they didn't just make it like a large version of a 3.5in floppy with a thin plastic case to wrap all discs rather than make require bulky caddies? Would a permanent protective shell and being sold in a small box have been worse than plastic jewel cases?

My 90MHz Pentium machine from 1994 had an internal SCSI 4X CD-ROM, the Toshiba XM-3401TA, which was a caddy-based. The NEC MultiSpin 3xe/3xi (3X external and internal drives, respectively) also used caddies. So it might not be quite accurate to say that caddies went away as soon as drives faster than single-speed were introduced.

The college I attended had a massive library of magazine and newspaper articles stored on CDs, all in caddies. You would punch in your search, it would tell you which disc to retrieve, then you popped it into the drive. Back then the idea was to replace microfiche/microfilm with this digital media, and the caddies helped to protect the discs. Now everything is on the Google.

My first CD ROM play for my Amiga 1200 was an Apple PowerCD CDROM player. It has support for Kodak PhotoCD and has a Composite output, headphone jack and coms with a. It is also a portable CD player which uses 9 batteries. The batteries are empty in about 1.5 hours. It is a SCSI-1 CD-ROM player and it is a single speed CD-ROM and could read disk with 175 KB/s.

When it is expected to have a caddy for every disc, then why not just use the caddy as packaging, instead of the jewel case?

The old caddies kinda remind me a bit of the discs used on the PSP as they were also basically cds (but in a teeny tiny size) protected by a case.

I too have all the drives shown in this video, I also have a few CD towers. Plenty of caddies, frustratingly I never had enough. Once 4GB SCSI hard drives were available I ended up converting a lot of my CDs to ISOs, having 2 CD towers worth of CDs contained on 2 external hard drives was such a gift!

Ohh I didn't knew the caddy stuff was available for consumers! I thought it was like prototype CDs. Before they developed disc drives that didn't require caddies. Nice video!

Minidisc brings back memories, I had that hardware for my A1200, used the squirrel scsi to connect it up, was so cool being able to store 250mb on a disc! How times change though eh, now I'm filling up 4tb hdd drives on my pc in no time at all lol

Our first CD-ROM drive was a 2x or 4x drive and it certainly did use a caddy. It came with a CD full of shareware and freeware called ZIDRAV which I have never seen anyone else really talk about. There were a few other demo discs as well.

I remember some of the first consumer-grade burners in the mid-late 1990s used caddies, even though most drives at the time were of the standard "cup holder" variety.

I remember the public library by me used CD caddies up until the late 90's, it took them a long time to get regular CD roms and eventually just have everything hooked up to the internet. Man does time fly, I still remember how cool it was to finally have Windows 95 on my 486DX2 PC. It was slow as hell on the internet but it worked lol. Plus my Dad gave me his old double speed CD ROM drive because he bought a 20x TDK cd rom drive. I still remember our amazement the first time we heard the TDK drive spool up for the first time lol.

I had one that I 'inherited' from my dad, it connected to the PC via external SCSI and was literally the size of a thin desktop PC. I think we gave it to an old friend of mine at the time once we upgraded to 5.25" tray based CD-ROM drives.

Takes me back to my first SCSI cd writer Yamaha Single speed used the caddy system. I always thought it was to stop vibrations and help with disc burning. Yet my first cd drive on my Amiga 1200 was a single speed scsi with squirrel card and used a normal mechanism.

I'm born in the early 90's, so I can't remember those at all but every since I first heard of them I find it sad these aren't a thing anymore. Not just were these still protected, one could actually put covers on the caddies and to borrow the disc to someone wouldn't result in getting a fully messed up media returned. The closest thing to CD caddies I can actively think of are PSP UMDs which were awesome but also very fragile because of its compact size.

Got my Amiga cd drive when my mate who was working at Dixon’s called me and said they were selling them off for about 40 quid!

our 1x CD drive in a Pionex 486 had a manual pull out CD tray

My first CD-ROM drive used a caddy, It was a NEC with a speed of 3X and a SCSI interface if I remember correctly. It also had its own little LCD screen, headphone jack and buttons to play CDs without the use of software.

I've got a NEC 4x SCSI CD-ROM reader that used caddies. I got it in the early to mid 1990s and used it with OS/2. FYI/FWIW

I have one of those CD-ROMs for Amiga 500. Didn't know how to use it - crammed in an audio CD without a caddy. It played, so I believe there is nothing to assume that caddies help CDs spin.

So I have a question. If I get a caddy or a cd drive could I somehow hook it up to my 1986 machintosh plus? To play some music on my computer? Or no?

Benj Edwards from the excellent (but not as excellent as The Retro Hour) podcast Retronauts?! Great video. I have to admit I was kinda disappointed when we got our 2x speed CD-ROM drive back in the early 90s. It didn’t have a caddy, just a boring tray like any other CD player?! 13yo me was a bit weird!

I theorized that early drives used caddies because they could utilize a smaller form factor than a top loading drive, but still make it cheaper to produce by using an eject mechanism similar to a 3.5 inch floppy drive.

One reason would be the drives were cheaper to make. Consider the manual floppy eject mechanism on Amiga versus the fancy electronic one on a Mac. Definitely cheaper to make a mechanical only eject mechanism with no electronics.

I'd forgotten about these caddy trays. Funny that you remember them & an interesting topic. At the time we just accepted them as part of the new CD tech I think. Also, my Mac Plus from 1987 had an external 20MB drive (huge!) and I saved up to buy the Apple CD read player which, I think, had a caddy. But it might have been an earlier CD machine. Anyway, thanks for the memory lane!

I had Caddies in my Sound Blaster kit xD it came with MechWarrior 2 / Loom / Luftwaffe games :P

I remember using caddies in 1995-96 on my dual-speed CD-ROM drive. Played games like The 7th Guest, Myst, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo on them.

Our school library had the first proper PC (they had a couple of BBC computers) in the school and that had a CD drive with a caddy... that’s my only experience of them, when I started building pc’s a few years later they were long gone and we were up to 12x CD roms! Lol

Hi Dan, I didn't get to see the Caddy CD's but I did end up buying some of the 1x and 2x speed CD rom which if you wanted to play multimedia you had to also buy a Sound card. I had to buy it as a package deal for $1200 AUD

I worked in the summer of 1994 to save up and I purchased a 3X NEC multispin SCSI that used a caddie. I thought the NEC was beautiful because it had a LCD screen on the front and buttons to play a music CD so you didn’t need to use a program to listen to music. At the time caddies was not so popular anymore but if you wanted 3X speed instead of 2X speed your only choice was the NEC that used a caddie. The popular choice was the creative labs 2X CD-Rom bundled with the SoundBlaster 16 which was IDE. The choice I went with was the SoundBlaster 32 AWE which had 2X dimm slots & a SCSI interface. I also planned on getting a SCSI 500 meg hard drive as well. It wasn’t a big deal to change the CD’s in the caddie and it would be difficult to scratch the CD.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact that using caddies saved money on manufacturing the actual drives as it eliminated the cost of an electronic loading mechanism.

I remember when I was young a CD blew up in my CD drive

The caddies were used in some of the first CD Jukeboxes as well.

I weirdly got to use DVD-RAM in the early 2000s. It was a very interesting storage for it time and quite large at over 4gb. It was after CD-Rom yet it still used Caddies for the protection reason. DVD-RAM was marketed for more Rewrite Sessions / Chunks or Archive. Thus I Caddies were meant to protect the discs.

I can only remember one CD-ROM i had that was using caddys. I only remember it was a SCSI-drive, and it was in the early/mid90´s. But maybe a bit strange, at the same time i had a car CD with caddy. And with a couple of extra caddys, it was actually very convenient to change disk while driving. Maybe that was the caddy´s biggest advantage.

Two things come to mind, the recess must have been wider to accommodate the caddy and I remember the Encyclopedia Britannica disc cost as much as the full set of books, which I can understand but also it was quite ridiculous.

Remember my first pair of blank CDs I bought, They were behind glass and you had to ring for the employee to come over and carry them to the cashier.