Re: Did anyone else notice
No way in hell you could get an internal CD reader in the early 90s.
The first CD drive that appeared in my system was an LMSI <something>, anno 1991. It was a factory surplus, so must have been in production for a while already. Standard 5.25 HH form factor, caddy loading, although you needed a converter card to be able to hook it up to a SCSI bus (it had a proprietary 16 pin connector).