History (1988): Business Card CD-ROM

This article was published by the Museum of Obsolete Media.

Business card CD-ROM (1998-)

Shaped compact discs first appeared in the mid-1990s, the first being The Flaming Lips CD single entitled ‘This Here Giraffe’ released in 1996.

Business card size (or credit card size) CD-ROMs followed from around 1998 and were produced by several companies in both the US and Europe.

They are generally 80mm wide, and between 58 and 68mm long. They may be rectangular, or may be rounded off to a similar size as the Mini CD.

Capacity is a lot less than that of full-size CD-ROMs, somewhere between 30 and 100MB, but for the purpose they were originally intended, as an enhanced form of business card, or for distributing company information like annual reports and promotional material, this was sufficient.

They will play in most compact disc drives, using the smaller recess on tray-loading drives. They won’t work in slot-loading drives.

A particular type of business card CD-ROM was known as the bootable business card (BBC), and generally contained a distribution of Linux that a computer could be booted from.