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From: barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXT: Please Consider 2MB -> 20 MB floppies
Message-ID: <344@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 11 Sep 90 01:48:46 GMT
Sender: news@MATH.UCLA.EDU
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Organization: UCLA Dept. of Math,
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The latest Byte (15th Anniversary Issue, pg 188) has a product
review of a new type of floppy drive that is the same size
and shape as a standard 3.5" drive, but the floppies hold
a whopping 20MB. If NeXT has to switch to floppies, this is
the type of drive I could live with. (You might actually
fit TopDraw on one floppy!).

Info:

* currently only available for IBM PC's (yuck), 
* $800 price tage, $25/floppy (= $1.25/MB) (likely to drop soon)
* 35 ms access time

As the article said, such a drive is _not_ that appetizing for the
IBM PC crowd: they can get a faster 40MB hard drive for half the price, and
they don't have a pressing need for larger floppies.

However---this would be the _perfect_ drive for the
power-user-cutting-edge NeXT crowd: 

(1) we need _big_, transportable media

(2) To us, the price is a bargain---the floppy drive currently available 
    for the NeXT (standard 1.44MB) costs about $800; and $25/disk
    is << than the cost of flopticals.

(3) To us, 35ms access time is pretty snappy, compared to the OD.

(4) We just had our OD pulled out from under us, so we need
    some comparable alternative for the future.

So, Yo NeXT! Why don't you get these folks on the line
(I forget the name---something like Xor---but they're based in GA)
and get them developing for NeXT---Maybe even offer to make them the 
standard drive on future machines. They'd have a target market,
we'd have our big floppies media, and NeXT would still
be on the leading edge of storage media. We'd all be better off.


    

--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)