I remember we had an older Compaq tower server that had a Pentium 60MHz chip AND a SCSI card. It was the the perfect device to burn a CD with and even it messed up on occasion. I can't imagine doing them on a 386. It wasn't until the Pentium II days when we could reliably burn a CD and still use the computer for normal tasks without having a buffer underrun.
Oh it was pretty much a dedicated machine when it was burning a CD. This was a postgrad office, there were 4 of us (three called Simon...) and we had a Unix workstation each.
Generally the PC sat in the corner and wasn’t really used. It had a SCSI card too, and when it was burning CDs it was left alone.
I remember one day a colleague of mine burnt 50 CDs so he could give them out after a -resentation, it was pretty damn reliable. I also used it as a mastering machine for a CD that I had professionally duplicated to sell, full of Atari ST shareware/public domain s/w.
These were very early days of Linux. I actually had already released the “Mint distribution kit” which let my beloved Atari ST work like the Unix machine I had at college, and this was before any sort of distribution for Linux (at the time, Slackware had yet to be released) was available. The MDK was quite popular, mainly amongst students I think, but of course paled into insignificance compared to what Linux/Slackware/all-the-rest would evolve into :)
I see your WWII-era parents got what I call the Alastair Memo, which stated that at least 50% of the boys born around 1955-1970 were required to be named Simon, Alastair, or Nigel.
