system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
It just took too damn long, memory is fuzzy but almost sure it took near the same amount of time or more than a full disc burn if it was covered with a raster image. Dunno if they had faster ones but with my HP one sometimes sharpie was better plus the cd/dvds had a slight markup.
gpt
Yeah, it had to be like 2x-4x speed to write them. Can imagine it would take a lot of laser power to make it faster.