patth@dasys1.UUCP (Patt Haring) (12/21/87)
Recently, I heard a hot industry rumour that Apple is going to be
releasing a CD-ROM system with their Unix clone on the Mac II (A/UX) in
January or February.
Well, that started me thinking about neat things I'd like to have on a
CD-ROM. I came up with a fair number of interesting ones, but I believe
that the rest of the Usenet community would probably have some even more
interesting thoughts on the topic. Consequently, I've cross-posted this
note to a large collection of relevant newsgroups to ask the maximal
number of people possible about `dream CD-ROM disks' in a month or two.
[I don't have access to "ca.unix". Also, it's my policy not to cross-post
into either comp.unix.wizards or comp.unix.questions. People willing to
wade through either of them should be willing to read this low-volume
group. Sorry if this causes you problems, Dave. -mod]
What I'd like hear about is:
What information would you find useful and helpful to have on
CD-ROM disks accessible from your Unix system?
All responses should be sent to a mailbox I've created just for this
purpose, and shall be summarized in a month or two.
Send your dream disk contents to:
...hplabs!atom!survey
or
survey%atom@hplabs.HP.COM
please.
For my part, my dream CD-ROM disks would contain:
o. All the Unix manuals + tutorials on a disk.
o. A dictionary, thesaurus, synonym/antonym listing, etc.
o. BSD and AT&T manuals on the same disk, with the SVID.
o. The ``usenet sources archive'', well indexed ($100?)
o. All back issues of interesting digests (e.g. Risks, The
Software Engineering Digest, Computers and Society, etc)
o. Some "C" reference guides (e.g. Kernighan and Ritchie, the
Stroustrup C++ guide, etc)
o. Some Pascal, Fortran, LISP, Prolog, etc etc guides in a
similar format.
o. Some good "Unix" reference guides.
o. A library of useful graphic datasets (for example geographic
data, maps, etc)
o. Standards guides, such as the CCITT documentation set.
o. Phone books? U.S.Government Office/Address listings?
o. ???
Of course, all of these would be with a well-designed index and some
magical software that will make accessing them trivially easy.
I invite you all to toss your thoughts my way!
Remember: DON'T followup this posting in news, MAIL replies!
--- Dave Taylor
disclaimer: While I mention Apples' A/UX and such, since I have no real
knowledge of the company nothing I say should be construed as
any sort of implicit or explicit statement from Apple! Yow!!
--
Patt Haring UUCP: ..cmcl2!phri!dasys1!patth
Big Electric Cat Compu$erve: 76566,2510
New York, NY, USA MCI Mail: Patt Haring; GEnie-PHaring
(212) 879-9031 FidoNet Mail: 1:107/701 or 107/222