benw@bocar.UUCP (B Weber) (06/05/85)
Copyright 1985, Antic Publishing Inc. Permission to reprint is hereby granted if article is reprinted in its entirety and credited to Antic Publishing. Monday, June 3, 1985 by Michael Ciraolo Chicago, IL -- Imagine always having an encyclopedia available on your Atari, as readable as a conventional book, but as searchable as an industrial database. Imagine, also, that you could search through 26-volume's worth of encyclopedia for term's such as "Costa Rica" and find 57 references in less than three seconds. And imagine a $500 price tag for this technology. Such technology, under development by Activenture in an exclusive agreement with Atari, was demonstrated at Atari's CES booth today. Called a CDROM, the technology includes a compact laser disk player connected to the direct memory access port (DMA) on an Atari ST, according to Activenture's engineering vice president Tom Rollander. The CDROM can hold a half gigabyte of information (500 megabytes), although the encyclopedia demonstrated occupied only a quarter of the disk's actual space. Rollander told ANTIC that independent publishers would announce specific products for use on the CDROM in the future, starting with the encyclopedia, and with more products introduced in the fall. Atari officials would not name the exact price or release date of the CDROM, and said they were still discussing whether Activenture or Atari would distribute the product. Rollander said the CDROM "would be available in the fall." Using the CDROM, you can browse through text, exactly as you might with a hard-copy volume from an encyclopedia, using the mouse for control. You can move foward or backwards by page, choose individual volumes, chapters or entries and so on. You can also specify any section of text for dumping to a printer, Rollander said. Or you can search for specific words or phrases, using powerful techniques familiar to industrial database subscribers. Specify a word or phrase and look for it in all of the text, in bibliographies, in tables, in subheadings, in specific entries, or in combination with other unspecified terms. Regardless of the search you choose, the computer screen will tell you how many entries were retrieved and let you look at each one. In each case, the text is black on white, with red cursor control and green highlighting of the chosen word. The amazing speed of the CDROM search is the product of previous indexing, said Rollander. In fact, the computer is not searching the text of the encyclopedia each time, but is searching a specially prepared index, which is larger than the actual text. The full text of the encyclopedia occupies 58 megabytes, while the index structure takes up 60 megabytes. "We've traded hours of processing time on a VAX for the data storage capacity of the compact disk," explained Rollander. His company took the magnetic storage tape used by typesetters and professional database suppliers and dumped an encyclopedia into a VAX computer. Using the VAX, Activenture identified, indexed and cross-indexed 141,000 unique words in the text, producing a structure Rollander called "an inverted database". The entire disk has a half gigabyte capacity, the same amount as 100,500 standard floppy disks, said Rollander. THE INFORMATION AGE Atari officials were ecstatic and called the CDROM "the most important innovation since home computers". "This is what computers are all about," said one Atari marketing manager. "This will change everything. This is IT!" Other reaction to the CDROM was mixed. In a crowd of distributors, retailers and members of the press, many people expressed their enthusiasm to ANTIC. Others were simply speechless. "We asked ourselves 'What are most people doing with computers in the home?' They're using them as doorstops, playing games with them and eventually throwing them in the closet," said Rollander. "Now there's a real reason to use the machines." "I expect resistance from many publishers, but eventually CDROMs will have greater market penetration than current encyclopedias," Rollander predicted. Nor is optical storage/inverted database technology limited to encyclopedias. Rollander said the principle may be applied to cookbooks and airline guides, and that his company was talking to a variety of other publishers. "I expect to see publications in the $100 to $150 range at first, dropping to $50 in time," he said. The cost of such optically stored databases is not high for two reasons: Activenture's indexing procedure uses the magnetic tape already in common use by publishers, so computer input is simple, with most books already existing on tape. Rollander also indicated that material stored on microfiche could easily be read, so databases of journals, the New York Times and out-of-print materials could be produced. Then there's the technology of the compact laser disk. Mastering such a disk costs only a few thousand dollars, and the mass production cost is less than that of magnetic tapes and disks. Because optical disks are mastered and pressed like records, there are no recording heads to wear out and no lengthy time spent making a recording, said Rollander. INFOMANIACS DELIGHT There is distinct pleasure in discovering all of the references to a particular word, references that you might never have found if you had simply looked up a primary entry. For instance, Rollander demonstrated a search using the word "toothache". In addition to the expected references under dentistry, he also found mentions in connection with cloves, henbane and certain painful medical procedures developed during the Middle Ages. The CDROM "gives students more appreciation for information than they get by simply looking up the subject," said Rollander. (ANTIC Note: CDROMs are capable of storing object code (programs) as well as text. In the near future, exclusive Activenture interviews with ANTIC will reveal other potential types of CDROM-based information, such as videotapes, photographs, and software.)