From: gt1619a@prism.gatech.EDU (James is just this guy, you know...)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy
Subject: Re: Some more misconceptions regarding OS/2 and NT
Date: 19 Aug 92 17:17:35 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology

In article <1567@anagld.analytics.com> sammy@anagld.analytics.com (Sam Blackburn) writes:
>mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>
>>Ever heard of TAPE?
>
>Have you seen what else MS is doing with CD-ROM?  How about other computer
>companies?  The CD-ROM is the only medium that is versatile enough to 
>make massive amounts of data accessible to the "user".  Can you imagine how
>responsive tape would be loading full motion video?  How about accessing an
>indexed database of census data?  I'd love to wait a few minutes while my
>tape winds and rewinds to read in data because I can write to tape.  CD-ROM
>is much more flexible in accessing data than a tape.  How about reproduction
>times?  How long does it take to reporduce 10,000 tapes as opposed to CD-ROMs?

CD-ROM is an excellent medium for the distibution of large amounts of data
as it is very inexpensive (about $1000 for the initial pressing, then about
$0.20 for each disk, not including the packaging).

It is, however, a distinctly poor medium for video, and the like. It's damn
slow. If you've ever dealt with full-screen full-motion video before, you
know that the transfer rate of contemporary CD-ROMS is far far too slow.
DMI makes a graphics card for the Amiga family of computers called the
resolver 020 which is a parallel/co-processed graphics card (1280x1024x24)
that in and of itself is capable of about 60 frames per second (30 fps is
all you really need), but even the fastest SCSI II drives can't transfer
info fast enough to maintain that rate (32 fps is the fastest that DMI
has even been able to get). CD-ROMS, of course, are much closer in access
times and transfer rates to diskettes (actually, thery're about 10x slower
than a hard-disk, which is pretty much right in between the two).

Tapes should be used only for archival purposes. That's all they're really
intended for anyway

The future of multimedia doesn't lie in CD-ROMS, they're just too damn slow.
Some othe mass storage medium, or a higher speed CD-ROM is in order.

>
>There's all kind of aspects to consider when you look at this.  CD-ROM for 
>software distribution ONLY is not the cheapest (for a drive anyway).  But look
>at the other things you can do with it.  MS will be shipping a developer's
>CD with 30,000-40,000 pages of information on it.  Reading the data in that
>database in a random-access manor would be insufferable via tape.

Large-scale developpers would get large hard-drives and copy the CD image
to the hard-disk. This is much faster and the cost is negotiable (as it
is much more flexible over a network). We have had to do this at Tech many
times (there's only one CD player in the department, and doing the genetic
database seraches directly on the CD takes forever; it's much faster off
the hard-disk and everyone has access to it).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James D. McIninch               | Author of MkvGene - DNA Coding Sequence
gt1619a@hydra.gatech.edu        |  Recognition Software for UNIX and the Amiga.
School of Applied Biology       |
Georgia Institute of Technology |    "Designing tomorrow's engineers today"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xref: sparky comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy:1890 comp.os.os2.advocacy:4117