From: discar@nosc.mil (Joe Discar)
Subject: Re: CD ROMS (was: Some more misconceptions regarding OS/2)
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 17:10:17 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.000035.28563@sjsumcs.sjsu.edu> rick@sjsumcs.sjsu.edu (Richard Warner) writes:
>
>>By your logic, nobody should be buying 5.25" floppy drives (or 1.44mb
>>floppy drives)--because 2.88mb floppies and 20 megabyte flopticals have
>>been announced.
>
>BIG difference, here.  First off, a 1.44 Mb floppy drive is $59.  A CD-ROM
>is >>$200.  Secondly, if XA and multipass take off they will SUPPLANT,
>not supplement current CD technology.  If they take off, your drive will 
>be a paper-weight because no one will be writing CD's that you can read.
>Period.
>

Yes, a 1.44 Mb floppy is "only" 25% the cost of a CD ROM drive (and I just
saw a Talon CD-ROM drive going for $159 new...).  We're talking that FOR A
DEVELOPER (at least for me, and I'm far from being a large developer), the
$100.00 difference in price is a pittance.  It is one month's phone bill,


If XA quickly obsoletes my CD-ROM drives (which I doubt)---and something
turns up that I need that requires XA (NT version 2 pre-alpha SDK perhaps?)
then I'll simply buy an XA compliant drive: by then, prices will have
dropped from the "astonishing" $500 (I just spent more than that on
a good sound card/midi synth for game development).

>>The consideration, friend, is whether or not the $229 *investment* will
>>pay off in two years (should you buy an "older technology" CD-ROM drive).
>>Why two years?  Because even if the XA and multipass CD's became available
>>*now* it still needs to find its way into the mainstream.  Look how long
>>it took 360K floppy disks to die off (if you can consider it dead).
>
>Look at the big picture.  CD drives have <1% market penetration.  If the
>new stuff coming out next year, ALL of which depends on XA/multipass
>technology, and results in 2-5% market penetration, then NO ONE will be
>writing CD's that will work in your drive.  Stop and think - the
>360 Kb drive analogy is totally fallacious, because there was 100%
>market penetration of 5-1/4" DS/DD drives at the time 5-1/4" DS/HD
>drives started making inroads.  A better analogy is the 5-1/4" DS/QD
>drives.  They were made totally, absolutely obsolete by the DS/HD drives,
>just like XA/multipass could make your CD-ROM obsolete.

Ah, but the QD format (if I remember correctly) was proprietary.  ISO 9660
and High Sierra file structures aren't--and physical format definitely isn't.
BTW, you always seem to allude that "multipass" will have an effect on
current CD-formats.  It doesn't.  It will probably only effect premastering
costs (the proposed standard will allow write-once CD's to be written in
incremental stages).  "Multipass" CD's will be 100% compatible with
current CD-ROM drive technology.

>
>Will your CD-ROM pay off?  Your gamble.  I paid my $3000 once to MS for
>the Windows 3.0 SDK, complete with promise of an upgrade path to
>OS/2 PM.  Once burned, twice shy.
>

Yes, but I spent less on my drives than I spent on my network.  It has
already given me a handsome return on my investment (the experience of
installing various drives in itself was worth the cost of the drives to
both me and my clients).

Yes it is my gamble.  I think I'll win.

>>>The medium is not standardized, yet.  It is getting there.  
>
>>The medium is standardized.  Any CD-ROM published to date can be read by
>>any CD-ROM drive on the market.  Just like "SCSI" *was* standardized until
>>a modification to the standard was made (SCSI-2).  
>
>Actually, the current ISO standard includes XA and multipass.  If your 
>drive does not include these, you have a non-standard drive :->

Again, ISO 9660 doesn't cover the physical "format" of the disks.  The disk
data will still be "written" by creating pits in a substrate.  ISO 9600
covers the "file structure" of the data stored on the disk--which is why,
although the disk can be "read" by the drive, an intervening driver needs
to be loaded to make the format compatible with your operating system.

My drive is "standard" from that perspective.  And if not, I'll still have
something to play my music on :)




Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy