Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!unisoft!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <5894@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 15 Nov 88 23:11:59 GMT
References: <1147@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> <1218@atari.UUCP> <3177@mipos3.intel.com>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 28

In article <1147@xn.LL.MIT.EDU>, olsen@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Jim Olsen) says:
> Imagine the value to those law students of having, for modest cost,
> the entire United States Code, Code of Federal Regulations, or United
> States Reports (Supreme Court decisions) in their shirt pockets!

In article <3177@mipos3.intel.com> ekwok@cadev4.UUCP (Edward C. Kwok) writes:
>Not very likely, each volume of the United States Report contains, on the
>average 1500 pages, and each page contains roughly 8000 characters. That
>makes about 12 Mbytes per volume. There are more than 470 volumes, the 
>last time I look. 

That's less than 6 Gigs.  I don't think that's an unrealistic
expectation for optical disks in 1998.  Of course, by then, there will
be more volumes.  A set of 10 or so current 660Mb disks is still going
to be a lot easier to deal with than a wall full of large books,
especially with indexing.  There'd be a main index on one disk that
also contained the latest volume(s) in progress; that one disk would
be periodically updated.

Unfortunately, the Next computer will turn out to require two floptical
drives to be useful for this kind of heavy-duty archiving.

Can anyone give us realistic compression and indexing estimates?  The
assumption that the two balance out is beginning to bother me.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
"Next prefers its X and T capitalized.  We'd prefer our name in lights in
Vegas."  -- Louis Trager, San Francisco Examiner