Next thing you know we’re going to go on a nostalgia jag about MPU-401s.
If you were too cheap for a sound card, you could still get 8 bits out of the parallel (printer) port. 
Well, like I said, it was high end, not a normal /family/ unit. DOS 2 (1983) was required, and the largest supported partition size was 10MB, but the disk size was not exceptional for a xenix or netware unit, and the prices were dropping fast. Also, it probably cost no more than an IBM branded hard drive 1/4 the size. All the required API for writing a driver and connecting to a larger disk was documented in the ordinary DOS 2 manuals, so obviously they were aware of the demand and supply.
Later I did use (DOS 2.11), large external disks at work, but our first home HD was just in the IBM format. (Half-height or full-height I don’t remember).
This was definitely 1983, because DOS 3 came out the next year, 1984, and IBM had half-height disk drives in 1984.
… And that was my dad’s computer. It wasn’t just something he got for the kids…
Did the same this with C64s. That SID chip rocked! The demos were pretty cool back in the late 80s and early 90s, but, man, there still is a dedicated community out there pushing this little machine to its absolute 8-bit 64K limits! I remember half the fun of cracked games was watching the crack intros that were basically mini-demos. And even for legitimate games, some just had such great intro music (at least for us 8-bit folk back then) like Electronic Art’s Skate or Die. I would just fire up the game to hear the intro screen, and I know I wasn’t the only one.
In 1999 or 2000, the dot com I worked for gave one of the first portable MP3 players as a holiday gift to its employees. I think the brand was iRiver. It had enough memory to hold about one CD of MP3s. It was like a Walkman or Discman where you couldn’t easily change the music . It was basically useless.
Portable digital music wasn’t practical until iPods and devices with similar specs came along. (I might still have a Zune sitting on a shelf somewhere.)
[Hooper]I got that beat.[/Hooper]
I have a Rio PMP300. Came out a year (1998) before the iriver. Recently loaded it (and its memory card) with songs. I think 12 total, and I had to downgrade some songs to do that. Without the memory card it holds 4+ songs depending on length and quality.
I had to dig out an old XP laptop that had a parallel port to add the songs. Using someone’s ancient homebrew software.
And somehow somebody figured out how to digitize music (it required a special peripheral that I never knew where it came from) and play it back on the C64. There were a few programs you could download from Quantum Link that played about 10 seconds of grainy sounding audio. I specifically remember part of the chorus of She Blinded Me With Science and part of Livin’ Lovin’ Maid. Took longer to load the programs from a floppy than it did to play them, and they used up every bit of BASIC memory available. Especially cool because at the time PCs could only do beeps and boops from the speaker.
Yeah, there’s a quirk in the SID chip where you can play samples on it by bit banging the volume register. It was not intended to be used this way, but some clever early SID programmers figured it out. You basically get 4-bit sample playback with the method. If you’re interested in the technical details, they are here.
That Skate or Die intro screen used a number of samples in it, essentially almost treating it as a fourth voice (SIDs only have 3 oscillators.) I remember the “Living Loving Maid” demo very well. There was also a program in Compute’s Gazette, I think, where you could use your Datasette player to digitize a snippet of music and play it back. I remember doing it to Weird Al Yankovic’s “Lasagna.” I can’t remember how long of a sample that program would let you record, but it wasn’t very long…maybe 3 to 5 seconds?
I can confidently say that by the spring of 1990, even shitball Packard Bell 286 PCs with 640k of RAM came with 40 mb hard drives (RLL, if I recall), because I got one.
POKE!
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SID
The hours I spent making not-amazingly-musical sounds with that wee thing. Also, sprites.
I actually have about a half dozen of those chips (both 6581s and 8580s) in the basement, though I’m not sure how many of them are genuine. I bought them to teach myself how to work with ICs, along with an Arduino. It was a pretty fun project. Taught me a lot about hardware on that level. Then I had kids, so I just never got around to getting back to finishing my project. I did get as far as writing a MIDI interface from scratch and connecting the whole shebang to a keyboard controller, though. Example here. So that was a lot of fun. But the long-term goal was to create a synth utilizing several SIDs. There have been other projects like this, but I wanted to do it from the bottom up. They’re really fun chips to play with.
NB (though I suppose it’s clear), using SID chips, MIDI files, Amiga tracker files, are all examples of real-time music synthesis, which is why the files are relatively small. People certainly had extensive collections of all of the above years before storing high-quality (compressed or uncompressed) PCM audio on hard disks became cost-effective.
I speculate that the reason a low-end computer like a Commodore 64 had an awesome sound chip built in and a $6000 IBM PC did not is that that kind of waveform generation was not deemed necessary for running your Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase, Xenix and what not.
Oh, yeah, and I’m just going off on the side discussion here. The OP definitely is talking about ripping CDs, so the tracker, MIDI, etc. kind of stuff isn’t relevant.
My anecdotal recollection is that somewhere in the late 90s was when ripping CDs starting to become mainstream. Like around 1997-1998. But theoretically when the average user could have started, that’s a more difficult question.
I’m trying to research when the first version of Audiograbber came out. I don’t know if it was the first of the ripping softwares, but it had to have been close and that’s what I remember as leading the first wave of rippers/CD audio extraction software. I can pin down somewhere in the mid-1990s, but I can’t find a version history or anything online.
I don’t have the dates without further effort, but good reliable SCSI CD’s were available for Mac’s long before they were usable for PC’s.
And WORM drives in that other, older digital optical format that preceded “compact” disks were available several years before CD burners.
“Write Once Read Memory”, and I can’t remember what the large digital disk format was called. And I said something unkind about the price and utility of Mac’s above, but this was the era when “It just works” meant a Mac, not a PC.
Write Once, Read Many.
And, you may be thinking about magneto-optical drives. I had one - it stored a huge 1GB on a hard, very expensive cartridge. They were called “Tahiti” drives.
You can own one…
I think you’re dead-on. The c64 was intended as a home computer from the get-go, meaning that it was made for games/fun stuff as well as productivity apps.
The IBM PC and its clones were originally so laser-focused on business uses that they didn’t have any sound capabilities whatsoever, as well as very limited graphics as well until fairly late in the game. A lot of early PCs had the green screens and no color graphics whatsoever.
My folks’ NEC APC III (~1984) had this. A giant green-colored, text-only screen with one game (Pinball), that you couldn’t see the pin. There were options for different colored text, but the program basically run in the ubiquitous lime green. There was no sound except for the “beep.” We had to get an adapter card to run a full-color screen for the one game we had. I still use the phrase, “Running on DOS v2.11” when I talk about some of the stuff I do at the office.
Tripler
Gawd, those were the days. . .
“any sound capabilities whatsoever” : I wouldn’t go quite that far. You could generate square-wave beeps on the built-in 2¼" dynamic speaker…
ETA and if you were a bored hacker, you could try to play back samples on it using PWM 