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From: thomsen@spf.trw.com (Mark R. Thomsen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: CD-ROM Drives
Message-ID: <28651837.1100@deneva.sdd.trw.com>
Date: 23 Jun 91 21:52:54 GMT
References: <1991Jun21.002247.15086@leland.Stanford.EDU>
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Organization: TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, CA
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<A whole bunch of people write a whole bunch of interesting stuff;
 too much to copy here.>

In which I air my opinions and then offer a solution for us all.

I don't want my storage media to be innovative, difficult, or
controversial any longer. I have paid many times over to get to
the point where the storage and distribution media should be
commodity items - inexpensive, competitively priced, and
reliable. Please!

NeXT and Cannon really tried hard to get a reasonable read-write
optical drive and media. However, we bought all machines with
hard disks and used the optical drives as offline storage and
backup devices until we felt comfortable. The OD was the only
piece of hardware that failed (the legendary dust problem hit
six times on eight drives). Yet, it is wonderful as a removable
and portable medium. We have a library of 50 ODs that can plug
into any NeXT - a nice, reasonably priced solution to what we
were doing. It just wasn't (and isn't) a competitor for a hard
disk unless reliability and performance needs are low.

Now, CD ROM has become commodity and we like it. NASA and JPL
have issued numerous earth science data sets on CD ROM. Our
government's DMA and USGS (and soon even the IRS) are publishing
information on CD ROM. Information that our tax dollars paid for.
We wrote our CD ROM driver for the 1.0 OS NeXT because we were
using this data. Sometimes, yes, the disks were formatted and
intended for PC and Macintosh - we wrote utilities to decode
the data for NeXT/Unix. However the important data we wanted
is easily available on CD ROM.

I really don't think one medium is the answer to distribution
(considering NeXT and other digit producers). We need a range
of sizes and capabilities to satisfy big and little, read-only
and read-write, backup and online, slow-is-OK and nothing-is-
fast-enough. The fewer the better.

But consider this. There is nothing that suggests producers
will have to pay and markup if they support multiple media
(boxes in the store are marked with the media, order forms
have media to mark, NeXTconnection and campus sellers can
tailor, etc.). Why not let us pick from the range of media
(CD ROM, floptical, floppy) and then order our software
accordingly?

Indeed, the media costs are a minor fraction of the price we
pay for software and most databases. I think the discussion
here might be a little backwards. Let us pick the devices we
prefer and then we order/buy media (to pop in) from a common
range. It won't cost much more for producers to go to master,
reproduction, or manufacturing companies for the different
media than it would for one media.

It could work.

Mark R. Thomsen