Or maybe that was just Creative Labs? I guess it was my first CD drive. It
came in a large decorated box that included a sound card, a CD-ROM drive,
and maybe something else. I stopped at the store's snack bar area and
opened it before leaving. Lots of jumpers to configure of course. Boxes for
that stuff are much smaller now.
there may be an ISA or a PCI slot on the sound card for the connection
with the CD-ROM more 15 years ago, but when I was googling it I could
not get any result. the CD-ROM can always serve as a CD players, and
you can even only connect it with speakers and a power supply to play
CDs. on the back of the CD-ROM there is a interface which is to be
connected to the sound with an audio cable to play the sound from CDs
through the sound card when the internal bus speed(PIO) is not high
enough or the CPU is not computable enough, I'm not very sure of the
reason. But you should know that there is a strong Electro Magnetic
Interference in the computer case so the audio cable is not a good
choice for playing CDs which cable transfers analog signals. Whereas
the earlier computers cannot play CDs through the digital transfer
mode which requires a function of DMA(Direct Media Access) that runs
at a higher speed than the PIO mode and transfers digital signals. So
you could not play CDs on computers if you had not connect the CD-ROM
with the sound card at that time.