Cheap, yes. But horribly unreliable. Underruns and other mysterious errors were so common that the failed burns gave us the notion of using compact discs as drink coasters.
Even after the transition from parallel port to internal burners, disc burning was largely a crapshoot.
By 1998, I was using an HP parallel port CD writer with a Gateway Solo laptop. By then, they were decently reliable. I don’t remember getting any bad CDs.
Even after the transition from parallel port to internal burners, disc burning was largely a crapshoot.