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From: jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari8
Subject: Re: laser disk for 8 bit ataris
Message-ID: <8610121746.AA04422@mitre-bedford.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 12-Oct-86 13:50:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: mitre-be.8610121746.AA04422
Posted: Sun Oct 12 13:50:10 1986
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Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
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Laser disks are available from several sources.  Toshiba is one name I
remember.  Most of them use SCSI ("skuzzy") interfaces.  I think the ST line
has an SCSI port but the 8-bitters do not.  One could be designed to run off
the XL parallel port or the XE cartridge port plus auxiliary port.

The laser disks ("CDROMS") I have heard of store 550,000,000 bytes.  That
is roughly 6 THOUSAND Atari 90K byte disks.

Currently laser disks (CDROMs) are READ ONLY devices.  They make sense as a
medium for publishing large volumes of data.  They are inherently a "write
once read mostly" (WORM) memory device, I believe.  Some examples of their use
that I have heard of are (1) publishing the totality of U.S. "Case Law" -- the
records of all legal decisions over the years that form the precedent for
current legal decisons; (2) somebody offers ALL IBM PC compatible Public
Domain software one ONE CDROM, thrown in free if you join their club and buy
the CDROM reader they offer.  Total cost about $1100 which is list price for
some readers.  At least one encyclopedia (Grolier) is being published on
CDROM.  These CDROMs are, to say the least BIG memory devices.

Does anybody have facts on who sells the cheapest such devices?  They
shouldn't cost any more than the audio ones, since I think they use the same
mechanism.  I have seen audio CD players offered for under $200.

-John Sangster
jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa