bdest@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Benoit Desjardins) (11/01/90)
In tidbits #26 (22-Oct-90), there was an article about a rumor that
Apple was planning to introduce sometime next year a new CD-ROM drive
with access time of 28 ms!!! Does anyone have any additional info on
that? For those who are interested, here is a copy of that article.
Benoit Desjardins
benoit@speedy.cs.pitt.edu
P.S. Any info from someone at Apple would be appreciated.
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Tidbits #26/22-Oct-90
CD-ROM Superstar
They arenUt fast, they arenUt pretty, and they seldom connect to your stereo
as nicely as you would like, but CD-ROMs are here to stay. They have found a
niche in the market despite their many limitations because they provide an
excellent way to disseminate lots of information cheaply. Someone at
Macworld Expo in Boston was advertising a monthly CD-ROM disk, much like a
monthly magazine (you thought wading through several hundred pages of
Macworld or MacUser was hard, try making it through 650 megs of a CD-ROM).
More reasonable uses of CD-ROMs are massive publishing projects for static
information, such as parts lists and the like.
The news is that Apple is going to step up the incentive to buy a CD-ROM
player sometime next year by introducing a new, cheaper model and lowering
the price on the current CD-ROM player. The cheaper model might even be
included internally in future Macintosh models. ThatUs kind of cool, but not
all that impressive, other than that you might have a use for the $500
thatUs burning a small hole in your checking account. No, the real scoopQand
we hope that it is trueQis that Apple will introduce at some point in the
next year (note the ambiguous date) a CD-ROM player (oh boy, another one)
having an access time of 28 milliseconds. RBig deal,S you say, Rmy Quantum
105 is 19 milliseconds.S Yes, but can your Quantum 105 read any CD-ROM disk,
all 650 megabytes of it? DidnUt think so. The fastest of the CD-ROM drives
these days have around a 350 millisecond access time, which is pretty poky.
This drive would be impressive if it were to happen, so I asked a
knowledgeable friend if it could be done. HeUs not a CD-ROM expert, but he
thought that the main problem was in the stepper motor and its control
circuitry. Essentially, stepper motors work slowly in audio CD-ROM drives
because there is no reason for them to step quickly. However, if a faster,
more powerful stepper motor was used in conjunction with a well-designed
microcontroller, a 28 millisecond speed would be theoretically possible.
Information from:
Pythaeus
Adam C. Engst - TidBITS Editor
---------------------------------------------------------------------a544@mindlink.UUCP (Rick McCormack) (11/01/90)
Guys. Guys. guys. (and also: Gals. Gals. Gals.) haven't you all seen or at least heard about the new video tape players like the NEC Cowboy, which can rewind a T-120 tape in one minute, give or take a few seconds? Now, you can set all that stuff you wanted to put on a CD_ROM onto video tape, with motion and everything, and stereo sound and like that! Hook the Cowboy to your Mac, and program a hypercard stack. Just like the big boys, except you now also get to be a video producer. And You can update the tape at your convenience. And it is not rumor - we can even buy them in Canada! So, go out and get one now and become a multimedia guru in your spare [pick one] time, bedroom, life.
tempest@walleye.uucp (Kenneth K.F. Lui) (11/01/90)
[Stuff about a possible CD-ROM drive with a 28-ms access time.] At first thought, I was excited about a potential fast CD-ROM drive; but on second thought, although the access time is much faster, the TidBit article--as presented in the post--doesn't talk about data transfer rate. I understand that CD-ROM drives are limited to the transfer rate used by normal CDs and they aren't anything to brag about. So, ultimately, even though this new CD-ROM drive will get to a portion of the disk faster, your Mac, or whatever computer, won't read the info into RAM any faster than current CD-ROMs. Comments? Ken ______________________________________________________________________________ tempest@ecst.csuchico.edu, tempest@walleye.ecst.csuchico.edu,|Kenneth K.F. Lui| tempest@sutro.sfsu.edu, tempest@wet.UUCP |________________|