Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!adobe!adobe.com!byer From: byer@adobe.com Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: CD-ROM Drives Message-ID: <16777@adobe.UUCP> Date: 21 Jun 91 20:00:43 GMT References: <1769@toaster.SFSU.EDU> Sender: news@adobe.COM Lines: 81 In article <1769@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: |I think the recent postings in the thread really miss the mark. |First of all, there's tremendous resentment among early adopters |of NeXT's "future software will only be available on floppy" |policy, and being forced to purchase floppy drives for their |ODful systems in order to continue using them--drives that often |don't work well and are fairly expensive--and not even being |given the option to use the FD controller on the '040 upgrades |they were all but "forced" to buy. The *last* thing in the |world they want to see is NeXT commit to yet-another-incompatible |storage medium. While it's too bad that floptical wasn't cooked yet, it has to be accepted. Is it better to accept and forgive a mistake, or to make a company forever bend over backwards (at great cost) for compatibility - probably at the sacrafice of further innovation? Fast, useable, reliable floptical won't be cooked for another few years. A low-cost interim solution has to be found, and I don't think floppies are it. $/MB is way high, not to mention sheer weight and volume. Have you ever gotten a package containing a full Unix OS on floppies?!? Weighs a ton! |Very few people in the Bay Area seem terribly interested in |CD-ROM for a variety of reasons (in no particular order): Plese don't try and speak for the rest of us. I know of quite a few other NeXTies who would prefer CDROM to the current solutions: - Floppies only handle one application, and not for very much longer at that. - Complex operating / windowing systems may require more frequent updating to fix found probelms. The cost of one CDROM vs. 50-100 floppies that it takes to hold one release is a major factor in updating frequency. |+ bad experiences with Apple and Sun CD products Learn from their mistakes. |+ slow And floppies and the current flopticals aren't? |+ not user-writable It a distribution medium, not a hard-drive substitute. |+ relatively expensive hardware Relative to a floppy drive and large numbers of floppies? Relative to the current flopticals? |+ large disparity between CD manufacturing cost and "fair market | price" compared with just about any other storage media |+ most "interesting" CD-ROMs "out there" are tied to software | that only runs on MSDOS or Mac OS |+ unattractive licensing terms have become the norm with CD-ROM | products Not that I've seen. Again, relative to the other useable *distribution* media (floppies, current flopticals) CDROMS are no different. |Now if NeXT wants to offer software on Exabyte 8200 cartridges, |I'm listening. :-) Yet-another-incompatible (and unreliable) storage medium? No Thanks! (Gee, I think I heard that somewhere before :-) | -=EPS=- I'm NOT looking for another storage medium. I can wait for the next generation flopticals for that. I can survive with floppies or DAT as backup and hard drives as main medium for the short term. But floppies/tape are NOT an acceptable *distribution* medium in the short term, IMO, because *distribution* implies much larger amounts of data. And CDROM seems to be the only thing that fits that bill. Besides, wouldn't you just *love* to pipe raw CD audio bits through the DSP, to do all *sorts* of interesting things with it! Or, CDV and NeXTtv! --------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott Byer NeXTmail: byer@adobe.com Adobe Systems Incorporated These are all my own 1585 Charleston Road, P.O. Box 7900 opinions - like anybody Mountain View, CA 94039-7900 else would want them! ---------------------------------------------------------------------