They’re not “write-protected”, they’re literally a write-once medium. The name “burner” isn’t a metaphore, that’s actually what they do.
Tbf there are absolutely rewritable CDs and DVDs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-RW
Though compatibility with regular players was a bit of a crapshoot.
That’s true. CD-RW “burners”, to keep accurate phrasing would’ve been well described as “melters”. They melted the medium, and erasing it was just melting it back.
I still miss them, so convienent in the mid 2000s era cars that could play CDs loaded with decent quality MP3s.
But I remember you could only do it X times before you’d actually be able to corrupt your data. Never had that happen, but it always felt a bit scary.
To be fair, practically every medium from tape to HDD to SSD has a limit. But CD-RW was a lot more vulnerable to data loss in my memory.
Correct, but only if the disk did not get finalized. Most cd burning applications and what was built into windows towards the end of that being relevant allowed for burning some data without finalizing the disc, but that is not the case generally when you are burning an iso.