I started my career as a mechanical engineer. The assembly shown here is the design for an optical disk drive I helped design in the early 1990s. At the time, optical drives were new and exotic; compact disks were not yet standard, and writable optical drives were extremely rare. This drive had a capacity of 250 MB and used disks which looked very similar to 3.5-inch floppies. The design is long obsolete, but in some ways still resembles the DVD drives we use today.