Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CD-ROM documents (was Paperless Office)
Message-ID: <2988@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 4 Dec 90 14:45:18 GMT
References: <11191@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <00940487.15804140@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU> <28083@mimsy.umd.edu> <1990Nov29.162726.11411@mozart.amd.com> <11212@charm.UUCP> <2974@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Dec3.220850.18352@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 18

In article <1990Dec3.220850.18352@watdragon.waterloo.edu> tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray) writes:

| It is unlikely that the access time issue will improve.  The reason CD-ROM's
| are used at all is their extreme cheapness, which is achieved by leveraging
| off the high-volume manufacturing technology due to the music industry. 

  Since it is improving I can't agree, but even the 500ms time is
largely irrelevant, since you pay that once in a well designed system,
then the data is transferred to scratch fast media.

  A number of vendors sell NFS servers, based on a few cheap GB of disk,
and a lot of optical in jukeboxes. Given some common sense in managing
this, it works really well. I've seen the Epoch presentations, and the
few people I've met who have it say the access is not a problem. I
assume that other vendors have similar systems.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
    VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.


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