Jeff Pack, Brown University '99 (English 112, 1996)
The emergence of CD-ROM drives had an incredible effect on the direction of software. With a single disc able to store over five hundred megabytes of data, storage space was no longer an important consideration. Snippets of video that formerly would have clogged hard drives could be retrieved on demand, and kept in a case when not needed; entire libraries could be placed on a compact disc. The influence of CD-ROM was most noticable, however, among computer games, where flashy video and sound could replace content.