Coming Soon ... A Whole New World Of Info

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday December 14, 1987

ATARI, HITACHI, IBM and Apple will shortly be launching CD-Rom disc players in Australia. The Atari machine is being sold in the UK at a figure something below $900 and allows the user to access discs which contain 800 megabytes of information.

Like other players this only works in the Worm mode - Write once read many times - but it will allow access to a new world of information.

The Atari disc drive is a major price breakthrough and, hopefully, heralds a new era of ultra cheap storage capacity.

Hitachi has a new CD-Rom machine which will fit into the standard disc drive cavity on a PC or clone. The price is going to be around $2,000 -roughly double the Atari - and offers 55 megabytes to the disc.

Hitachi is the manufacturer that has joined with MicroSoft in the production of a disc of reference works that includes the 1987 World Almanac of Facts, Chicago Times Manual of Style and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. This is the first disc I know that will run co-resident with a word processing program, in this case MicroSoft's The Word, so that you can cut and paste from the reference work into the copy you are writing. (Worth noting that Sony and Philips effectively developed the hardware standard for CD-Rom disc players but Hitachi has the major market share. This is because it was there first with a compact model that will fit in a computer. The software standard is being developed by what is called the Sierra Group, a loose confederation of Apple, Hitachi, Philips, Sony, Microsoft plus seven other major players.)

IBM has included a CD-Rom disc on its options list for the new PS/2 line of computers.

Apple is expected to announce its CD-Rom player at its annual general meeting in the first quarter of next year. This announcement is quite inevitable as the Apple HyperCard screams out for a CD-Rom disc for it to be used to its full potential.

While we are on the subject of Apple launches the current story is that Apple will launch three new LaserWriter printers at the MacWorld exhibition in San Francisco in January.

The high end machine is code named "Swift" and will have a Motorola 68020 chip running at 16 megahertz to drive it. This is the same set-up that is used in the Agfa Gevaert 400 dots per linear inch printer so that it seems like that this new model of printer will offer a far higher resolution than 300 dots per inch. 460 DPI is the figure currently being bruited around. This machine will complement rather than supplement the current LaserWriter Olus and will be considerably more expensive.