Playing The Snoop, Courtesy Of Cd-rom
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday May 20, 1990
I TRIED Telecom's 013 service, but the operator curtly told me she could not help if I did not supply a name or address. I wanted to find out who my neighbours were, and their phone numbers - without asking them.
So, in the Alexandria offices of Read Only Memory, I turned to the laptop and its CD-Rom drive, inserted the $1,499 disk, and typed in Audley Street, Petersham, giving the street numbers I was interested in.
Up flashed the details. Names, phone numbers. While at it, I checked out all the listings in the street, working out a rough social mix from the surnames.
I could have printed out the list if needed. A lot of people, mostly marketers do. They then send things to your letter box.
There was also a phone number in my address book without a name next to it. Again Telecom could not help. I typed in the phone number, and a name popped up instantly.
I was not intruding on anyone's privacy. I was using an electronic phone book on a CD-Rom disk which contained no more personal details than those already published in Telecom's printed directories. The difference was that as electronic data on a disk, the information could be manipulated by a text retrieval program.
Two such electronic phone books - one an update - have been launched in the past two weeks, by local companies Read Only Memory and International Data respectively. They have marked the commercial arrival of the CD-Rom disk in Australia, until a year ago a promising technology struggling for the "killer"application to launch it.
The sheer amount of data on an electronic phone book - Read Only Memory's Australia on a Disc II, contains 70 Yellow and White Pages books from around Australia, or 5.8 million listings - would not reasonably fit on ordinary floppy disks, or most hard disks.
To cram that amount of data, 600 or so megabytes, on standard 5 1/4 inch 1.2 Mb floppies would require 500 disks. Yet it leaves room to spare on only one CD-Rom (compact disk - read only memory) disk.
A CD-Rom disk looks just like the compact discs you might have in your stereo, yet it can also carry text and images, as well as sound, and needs its own special CD-Rom drive, which links to a PC. The standard memory capacity of CD-Rom disks has risen from around 500 to 680 megabytes (needless to say, disks with much higher capacities are in the works).
While utilitarian applications such as phone books, census data, bibliographies and indexes, and product information and technical documentation are selling most of the CD-Rom drives and disks in this country, other applications more relevant to the ordinary PC user are emerging.
At the moment, these are a grab bag of titles, to say the least.
One of the larger local distributors of CD-Rom disks is Read Only Memory, in Alexandria. From its catalogue, you can select anything from All About Cows, a massive reference work of bovine history and anecdotes featuring text and high-resolution colour images, to Pravda on CD-Rom, the complete translation of the 1987 issues of the Soviet newspaper.
But the most prevalent titles are literary, scientific and biblical reference works, and encyclopaedias. Typical are Shakespeare on a Disc, which contains all the playwright's plays, poems and sonnets, in English "and American", according to the distributor; and the Ellis Bible - nine complete bibles, 20 biblical reference works, 27 concordances and various sermons, with versions in Greek, Hebrew, and English. (It seems in some cases that the publishers have had to think of ingenious ways of filling the disks.)
For any writer, researcher, teacher, student or school, such titles would provide an incalculably large source of reference material that would be instantly accessible.
Many other CD-Rom disks carry thousands of high quality clip art images, which can be imported into desktop publishing programs such as PageMaker or Ventura .
Bill Gates, the influential chairman of the software house Microsoft, believes that it will take CD-Rom drives to make PCs more personal and interesting to the average computer.
The reason is that CD-Rom disks will encourage the use of interactive, or multimedia applications. These are the extremely versatile, innovative programs that use graphics, animation, video and sound, as well as standard text, but are held back by their need for exorbitant amounts of memory.
CD-Rom disks solve the storage problem, and multimedia encyclopaedias are an early example of the new genre. Encyclopaedia Britannica's CD-Rom version of its Comptons encyclopaedia not only carries the text of 26 volumes, but 15,000 computer illustrations, 5,800 maps and charts, 45 animated sequences and 60 minutes of sound. They've also thrown in a copy of Websters Dictionary
Warner New Media's Magic Flute plays Mozart's operas through the computer speakers using the highest fidelity sound, while displaying the libretto and a written commentary on the screen. It also includes a glossary for the opera novices.
It is rumoured that at least three major computer manufacturers will release machines that actually incorporate the drives, in time for the Chicago computer show in a couple of weeks. Commodore is believed to be working on an Amiga with a CD-Rom drive, to be released in the second half of the year.
Cd-Rom drives should not be confused as competitors or future replacements for a computer's hard disk.
The typical hard disk may store only 40 megabytes by comparison, but it can access that information very quickly - 26 milliseconds now considered reasonable. A CD-Rom drive accesses its information in 500 milliseconds, or half a second, an eternity in hard disk terms which would be unacceptable for the running of computer programs. Moreover, a computer can write - or add or alter information - on the hard disk. It cannot do so on a CD-Rom disk, whose information cannot be altered.
(There are high-capacity relatives of CD-Rom drives. WORM drives allow a computer to write information to the disk just once, hence the acronym: Write Once Read Many times. But they are much more expensive and not as widely available. More promising, but barely available are magnetooptical drives, such as the one manufactured by Canon for Steve Jobs's NeXT computer. These are competitors for hard disks, because they access removable disks of 512 megabytes at 80 milliseconds, and have no limitations on the number of times they can write on them.)
Another reason for the inevitable spread of CD-Roms is that for general publishers, it is much cheaper to press a few thousand CD-Rom disks than a few thousand books. And unlike the printed word, such information can also be loaded into a computer's random access memory and edited.
Indeed, some consider CD-Rom technology to be the fourth major new method of distributing information after the invention of movable type, radio, and television, and the first in centuries that allows individuals and very small companies to profitably publish on their own.
There are fears, though, that the relatively low cost of CD-Rom publishing will encourage vanity publishers - those who publish books they have written themselves.
If CD-Rom is going to give anyone a hard time, it is book printers and paper manufacturers. Book publishers can simply straddle the mediums, and become electronic publishers as well, such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. Locally, CCH Australia, major law and business publishers, now put out the Australian Master Tax Guide on a CD-Rom disk.
Those selling CD-Rom technology, such as Read Only Memory's managing director, Mr Guy Norman, point out that the music industry is helping reduce the cost of CD-Rom technology because the same factories that produce audio CD players and discs also produce the computer versions.
But that brings us to the question: why can you buy a decent audio CD player for around $300-$400, while you won't pick up a CD-Rom drive for less than three times - in most case four to five times - as much?
Major computer and electronics companies such as IBM, Apple, NEC, Atari, Hitachi, Sony and Philips sell CD-Rom drives locally. The cheapest are internal models, that fit inside a computer's 5 1/4-inch floppy drive slot. Read Only Memory sells one from LMSI, a Philips subsidiary, for $925, while Atari's costs $995.
But most external models hover around $2,000. Of those we surveyed, IBM's was the dearest at $2,600, LMSI's the cheapest at $1,273.
A number of product and technical managers told the Herald that CD-Rom drives are more expensive because they have additional error-correction circuitry and more sophisticated servo mechanisms.
An audio CD calculates the damaged or missing bit of a music signal by averaging out its surrounding bits. But with computer data, the missing bit is likely to be a letter, so more complex error- correcting algorithms are needed. As well, CD-Rom drives access data on a disk in a random pattern, unlike the linear way used by audio CD drives. As a result, they must know whether to speed up or slow down the heads to read the data.
PC expert and former hacker Steve Gold connected a cheap audio CD player to a computer. It shifted data from a CD-Rom disk, he says, but he could not control the heads to read selected information.
The feeling in the industry, however, is that the incompatibility between the different drives will soon disappear. Indeed, NEC Australia is about to release a lightweight portable drive that runs both CD-Rom disks and audio CD discs, the CDR-35. It will retail for $895, one of the cheapest yet, though you will need an interface board costing $370 for PCs, and $95 for Macintoshes.
There is still much scepticism about CD-Roms replacing the printed word. Anthony Estorffe, a librarian from the State Library, pointed out: "You can't read a CD-Rom on a train."
True. But we must report that last week Sony released the DATA Discman, a device that looks like a Sony Walkman. This displays text on a liquid-crystal display from a special CD-Rom disk. Each disk contains the equivalent of about 300 paperback books.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald