sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) (05/29/91)
Bill Clark was kind enough to mail me more info about the Mini-CD format which
Sony is working on. Apparently, the disk is about 2.5" inches in diameter
(smaller than a shirt-pocket 3 1/2") and can hold 175MB.
Has anyone (can anyone?) admit to seeing one of these things as a data storage
product to be integrated with a PC and/or a laptop? Since the audio player uses
1 Mbit of RAM to buffer the compression of a 2.5 audio disk (compression scheme
uses some funky tricks to get roughly 5:1 ratio, total of 74 minutes of playing
time), and probably a couple of chips to do data compression, the actual 175Mb
record/play mechanism is prob'ly pretty compact.
Hook this sucker up to a RISCy chip either on desktop or on a laptop
(Porta-snake anyone) and you're cooking. I think 2" hard disks in laptops are
projected to be 100-120MB come next year, so you have some interesting
tradeoffs. Or a built-in backup/storage device and a hard disk.
Sony claims the media and hardware is cheaper (!) than DAT (DAT being reserved
for pureist audiophiles :-).
What ever happend to Tandy's THOR read/write CD-ROM technology?
Signature envy: quality of some people to put 24+ lines in their .sigs
-- > SYSMGR@CADLAB.ENG.UMD.EDU < --