bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) (11/08/88)
In article <13203@andante.UUCP> prem@andante.UUCP (Swami Devanbu) writes: >When I read a book, I want to curl up in a comfy chair, with a blanket >around me, a bowl of curried popcorn, and a pot of tea. >A computer is a computer and a book is a book. I, for one, have hundreds of pounds of !@#$%^ reference manuals. I would like to throw them off a tall building, but can't because I "might need them someday". I don't curl up with them, I usually need them when I'm at the computer and have it powered up. Optical disks are fantastic for this. Microsoft, to their great credit, have finally released a CD-ROM with most of their manuals on it. GREAT! (They forgot to mention the price, though!) When is Sun going to do this, instead of sending out a crate of manuals that's bigger than the crate the machine came in? Other uses for optical disks: o Back issues of your favorite mag. You could toss with a clear conscience all your back issues of PC-Rag. Pay $30 extra per year, and get the annual CD-ROM! o The telephone book. Pleeese! It's really hard to do a search on it the way it is! o Back newspapers. You can't buy them anyway, and newspapers are a terrible problem to store. o Automobile repair manuals (last time I bought one, it was a foot thick! with 6 inches of errata to be inserted!). o Parts catalogs (take a look at them in an auto supply house, or in an EE house). The main barriers I see are: 1. The drives should cost about $200 (like audio CD players). $1000 just kills it. 2. The CD itself should cost <= the cost of the paper version. When it costs 10 times as much, people stick to the paper. Let's save some trees!
wetter@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Pierce T. Wetter) (11/09/88)
> o Parts catalogs (take a look at them in an auto supply house, or > in an EE house). > Even better, how about a complete set of data books. Lets see, I need a transistor with the following paramters (blah), Digital Librarian says that the Motorola xxxxx, the RCA yyyyy, and the National zzzzz will do the job. That in itself would make the next box worth the money for many companies, Note to Motorola: YOU DON"T NEED A NeXT BOX TO DO THIS, any optical drive will do. Start this project now! (However, if you do use the next box you can transfer all the spiffy graphs and pictures too.) Pierce -- ____________________________________________________________________________ You can flame or laud me at: wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu or wetter@csvax.caltech.edu or pwetter@caltech.bitnet (There would be a witty saying here, but my signature has to be < 4lines)
rtw@lzfmd.att.com (Rich Wurth) (11/30/88)
In article <8544@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, wetter@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Pierce T. Wetter) writes: > > o Parts catalogs (take a look at them in an auto supply house, or > > in an EE house). > > > Even better, how about a complete set of data books. Lets see, I need a > transistor with the following paramters (blah), Digital Librarian says that > the Motorola xxxxx, the RCA yyyyy, and the National zzzzz will do the job. > > That in itself would make the next box worth the money for many companies, > > Note to Motorola: YOU DON"T NEED A NeXT BOX TO DO THIS, any optical drive > will do. Start this project now! (However, if you do use the next box you can > transfer all the spiffy graphs and pictures too.) > > Pierce > -- > ____________________________________________________________________________ > You can flame or laud me at: > wetter@tybalt.caltech.edu or wetter@csvax.caltech.edu or pwetter@caltech.bitnet They (MOTOROLA) already have a floppy disk for PC-compatibles called ``SPECS IN SECS.'' I got mine unsolicited in the mail a couple of months ago. I only glanced at it briefly enough to note that it covers discretes only, whereas my interests lie almost exclusively in digital logic parts. It does support some amount of searching by family/by parameter/by part number/etc. but I don't recall specifics. I think it would be great if they expanded it to include digital logic. (Now, how fast is this MC10H116, anyway? Could you hand me that brown book on the bookshelf? :-) ) (I added sci.electronics to the newsgroups, and directed followups there.) R. T. Wurth / lzfmd!rtw OR rtw@lzfmd.ATT.COM AT&T-Bell Labs / LZ 1H-303 / 201 576 6332 307 Middletown-Lincroft Rd. / Lincroft, NJ 07738
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/01/88)
In article <938@lzfmd.att.com> rtw@lzfmd.att.com (Rich Wurth) writes: >I think it would be great if they expanded it to include digital logic. >(Now, how fast is this MC10H116, anyway? Could you hand me that brown >book on the bookshelf? :-) ) Ha ha, good luck, the brown book isn't going to tell you either! Unless the 10KH datasheets are a whole lot better than the worthless junk that passed for 10K datasheets last time I looked... I'm really not impressed by a so-called datasheet that doesn't even give the minimum pulse width for a clock input. Especially when Fairchild's 100K datasheets are models of clarity and high information content. -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu