recommend a CD/DVD burner to me (G4 Yikes)?

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Concur, outside the observation that decompression time that makes for better quality work and relationship time is f*****g priceless! :approve:

That era in the early-mid 90's before CD-ROMs became universal but a large office suite or OS might come on 20+ floppy disks was probably the high point of progress bar agony. Installation could take hours *and* you had to babysit it.

OBAGOCH YES!!!!!!! 8-o If CD-ROM drive prices had not come down as quickly as they did the Zip disk would have undoubtedly become the standard for distribution media. If you bought a software package off the shelf at the end of that period, it came with a CD and an order form for a friggin' carton of floppies as an alternative. A zip drive was pretty much chump change compared to CD for a while there.

 

[Paralel]

...The obvious thing going unsaid here: I'm pretty sure that everyone here would have to admit if they thought their free time had any monetary value retro computing would probably not be their hobby of choice.

Quiet true

 

[just.in.time]

Many of the IDE/PATA Pioneer drives will work without issue. I think several of Apple’s drives were just relabeled Pioneer units. I have one in my G4 and I don’t recall needing to use patchburn to get it working for native burning under Tiger. (However I have used Patchburn back in 2004 or so to get a CD burner working in a Beige G3 running Panther and it worked great, handy utility.)

 

[trag]

It's probably wrong, but I have an old hint of a memory that suggests that holding down the 'C' key just causes the machine to check SCSI ID 3 for a bootable device.   If the optical drive isn't at ID 3, no workee.

There may have been another key combination that let one select the SCSI ID to boot from.  On machines with multiple "SCSI" busses, either method is fraught.