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From: brett@cayman.amd.com (Brett Stewart)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: CD-ROM documents (was Paperless Office)
Message-ID: <1990Dec4.155402.28862@mozart.amd.com>
Date: 4 Dec 90 15:54:02 GMT
References: <11212@charm.UUCP> <2974@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Dec3.220850.18352@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: usenet@mozart.amd.com (Usenet News)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Austin, Texas
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In article <1990Dec3.220850.18352@watdragon.waterloo.edu> tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray) writes:
>There's been discussion of CD-ROM here recently.  Should just point out one
>important architectural issue: CDROMs have a seek time of on the order of
>500 ms - that's right, half a second.  This means that the selection of
>algorithms and data structures available for use on CD-ROM is very highly
>constrained.  Also, it means that a CD-ROM is unlikely to be a satisfactory
>database access medium for more than one user at a time.

Of course, there are things, like full motion video in hypermedia,
where this becomes less important.  Accessing such an object with a
1-second penalty followed by transfer of vast quantities of digital;
picture data works.  Adding full-motion video to a user interface may
be from a technical point of view a 'constraint' but many users will
likely not see it that way.

I believe there are CD jukebox servers now.  The idea is anybody can
query them, and they hold all the stuff.  I think that the
satisfactory or unsatisfactory characteristic of these as database
servers depends on the type of data, its organization, whether the
servers do anything smart, like keep all the indexes from every CD
loaded on a hard disk, to cut down on multiple CD seeks, etc.

One point made in this string has been that authoring of .6-2.4
Gigabytes of anything is difficult.  Video can burn up that storage
capacity really fast. (But authoring a hypermedia CD is still
hard.)

Best Regards; Brett Stewart
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.           1-512-462-5321  FAX
5900 E. Ben White Blvd MS561           1-512-462-4336  Telephone
Austin, Texas 78741      USA           brett@cayman.amd.com


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