Also when did CD burners become standard or common?
It was sometime between 1991 and 1996. I started college in 1991 and they were rare for most of the time I was there. I started grad school in 1996 and they were common by that point. My mother’s MAC had one (1x speed) when she bought it in 1993 but that might have been a little ahead of most PC’s.
Shagnasty: Why put ‘Mac’ in all-caps? It isn’t an acronym.
An Gadaí: It was early-to-mid 1990s, depending on how much you wanted to spend for a single computer and whether you wanted to buy name-brand or from a white-box retailer. CD-ROMs were part of a big boom in ‘multimedia’ software, meaning stereo audio and full-motion video, so they were around after mass-market audio and video technology had caught up with that and after CPUs were fast enough to handle it (at least a 486, more likely an early Pentium).
Myst and 7th Guest were a couple of the first big games to come out on CD-ROM, and they were released in 1993. I’d say CD-ROM drives got a big boost in popularity in the next few years after that.
If by standard, you mean that you pretty much automatically got one with an average computer purchase, I’d have to say 1995-1996, judging by my huge stack of “PC-WORLD” magazines from that era I discovered in my storage unit.
My mom bought one for our IBM 486 in '93 or thereabouts. As a previous poster mentioned, “Multimedia!” was the marketing buzzword of the time, and she got our drive as part of a multimedia kit at Radio Shack. It included a sound card and speakers too.
CD-Burners became common around the year 2000 IIRC.
The games drove cd drive developement like much other equipment. The drives were not a standard IDE interface withe digital out. You bought sound cards and the cd drives that were computable with each other. The sound interface was the separate cable to the sound card. Interfacing was a pain for a number of years.
Requirements for a Sound Blaster multimedia kit I have the box for:
386SX
Windows 3.1
4MB Ram
MS DOS 3.1
Super VGA 640x480, 256 color
30MB hard drive
ISA 16 bit expansion slot
It came with the game Loom. It was released in 1990. The price tag on the box is missing the date, but the game was a new release at the time. It was common to have a cd rom after 1990 if you played games. Personal use computers likely had a cd rom installed in them the first few years of 90’s, because gamers owned them. The business computers went a long time before they had cd drives installed in most machines.
Looking at software manuals for burning cdr’s I would say late 90’s is when cdr burners were becoming common.
I see the Pentium CPU was release in 1993, and by that time the cd drives were becoming standard equipment.
I remember reading an article in the mid 90s where they were excited how CD-Roms were great to stop piracy, because it’s just way too expensive and time consuming to copy CDs, and pirates would never spend that much money for so little gain. And I thought at the time that this seemed like a very short-sighted attitude, but figured they knew more about the technology than I did.
And then CD burners started to appear on the market probably no more than six months after I read that, and 12 months after that were ubiquitous. So that was, I think, around 1998 or so.
I bought my first PC in 1993 and it did not have a CDROM. I bought one for it in 1994. I think that they became standard around 1995.
Heh, some of us still don’t have a CD burner. 
But my computer works well as long as I remember to wind it up every eight days. 
It was very advanced makeup.