Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!mailrus!ncar!husc6!rice!titan!bbc
From: bbc@titan.rice.edu (Benjamin Chase)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Frivolous standardization
Message-ID: <2056@kalliope.rice.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 88 23:49:32 GMT
Article-I.D.: kalliope.2056
References: <41210@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Reply-To: bbc@titan.rice.edu (Benjamin Chase)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 45

In article <41210@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> wald-david@CS.YALE.EDU (david wald) writes:
>We seem to have a naming problem.  Specifically, what is going to be the
>casual name for the NeXT machine's optical media?
>    1) magneto-optical drive, and other official or semi-official terms.
>    2) optifloppy,
>    3) floptical drive,

I really don't understand what all you people think is floppy about the
storage media for the NeXT, or your CD player, etc.  Also, I don't
understand why you'd call a disc a drive.

Moving right along, I think "1)" above is a fine choice if you're into
acronyms, since then the name becomes "MOD".  Of course, going with the
acronym reintroduces the confusion between MODisc and MODrive, with which we
seem to have problems :-).  Also, consider 

    4) optidisc
    5) opti
    6) opticard

The motivation behind 6) is that the actual disc is enclosed in a
rectangular box.  To the user, it may look very unlike a disc, especially if
the box normally shields the disc from view.  Anyone who has handled one
care to comment?  Certainly, other good choices exist.  Let's hurry up and
find a good name for this thing before someone gives it name like "Compact
Disc", which gets shortened to something like CD, which sounds a lot like
something you might get at a bank if the interest rates were good.

Barring better names, my personal favorite is 4).  If you have any other
names, or useful comments about the suggestions made, _I_ certainly won't
stop you from posting.  If you have any votes, I'll be happy to tabulate
them.  My mailbox has been _so_ empty lately...  Try and keep this list a
little cleaner, though.

On a related note, for people who have read this far, I hear that a 60Mbyte
chunk of the disc is read-only, or is readable faster than the rest via a
special read-only head, or some such rot.  I suppose the intent is that
certain seldom-written things such as the OS and the reference library might
live in this region of the disc.  This scuttlebutt comes from a regional
sales rep who talked at Rice last week.  Anyone who _knows_ about this care
to post a concise and factual summary?

	Ben Chase	bbc@rice.edu		Computer Science Dept.

Ben Chase	bbc@rice.edu		Computer Science Dept.