It has been six years since optical drives were built-in devices, but I have always kept one or two drives around for the very occasional CD/DVDs I read or burn. This morning I attempted to burn a DVD for a very young friend my wife is teaching to sew and discovered the drive in my NewerTech Mini Max enclosure can no longer generate the proper frequency to burn a DVD+R. No problem, I can use the external Apple SuperDrive connected to my wife's Mac mini. It was then I discovered you can no longer share an optical drive in Catalina.

I have to wonder how many of us have what we thought were imperishable records committed to optical media because we thought it would last forever (or at least close enough for government work) and the media is still good, but do we have the hardware or software to read it. I am looking at my DVDs with generations of tax and financial data. Heaven help me if there should ever be an audit.👨🏻‍💻 🤯 😱 🙇🏻‍♂️

DOCMENTATION SIDELIGHT: I have recently become aware that more and more Apple "User Guide" and similar online documentation has multiple sections or pages for different versions of MacOS. An indicator of how much is changing under the hood and how rapidly it is changing in MacOS, but going largely unnoticed by users.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein