As the price of CD-ROM drives continues to fall-they`re below $400 now-people are increasingly using them in their personal computers, and one soon may end up on your desk.
But you won`t likely be playing Madonna`s latest with the drive, though the discs do look like audio CDs. (CD-ROM stands for compact disc, read-only memory.)
You`ll be doing things similar to what the U.S. State Department found it could do with its foreign-affairs manual. Each loose-leaf manual is 12 volumes, has 6,000 pages and weighs 98 pounds; it costs $3,000 to print, bind and send each one to an overseas post. There are about 250 such posts.
So the department put it all on CD-ROM. It costs $2 to make each copy and two ounces of postage to send, noted Philip M. Tinney, deputy assistant secretary for information systems at the State Department. The standard price to make a master is usually around $800.
”And with the computerized index, you can find any information you want in 3 seconds-that`s a lot of productivity gain,” he added.
Tinney plans to produce a second disc containing all the department`s forms (there are more than 350). From the disc, the forms can be output as needed on laser printers-so overseas post personnel, for example, won`t have to worry about keeping Return of Destitute American Seaman forms in stock.
Other uses are to be found among cottage-industry publishers such as the eight-person Counterpoint Publishing in Cambridge, Mass., which offers a CD-ROM version of the Federal Register.
The paper version of this daily publication amounts to 64,000 dense pages a year of new federal regulations, rules, bidding requirements and grant opportunities, said Jonathan Robbins, Counterpoint`s director of marketing. But for just under $2,000 a year, he will send a weekly CD-ROM with the latest six months of the Federal Register (the information rolls forward each week), plus search software.
Then you, too, can probe that 400-page definition of rice varieties that Robbins is fond of citing.
”The demand is incredible. When the price for CD-ROM readers went below the $500 mark a year ago, the market started to explode,” Robbins said.
Such applications are possible because CD-ROMs pack enormous data capacities. Like their CD audio cousins, they are removable from the PC, so you can have libraries of them. And, also like their cousins, you can`t record on them after they`re created.
But instead of a CD`s 74 minutes of sound, a CD-ROM can store about 650 million bytes of data.
How much data is 650 million bytes? Well, the text of the 26-volume Compton`s Encyclopedia (9 million words) took only about a fifth of a disc, said Stanley Frank, president of Compton`s New Media, a subsidiary of Encyclopaedia Britannica in Chicago.
So 15,000 photographs, 60 minutes of sound recordings, a dictionary, a world atlas and a 500-year timeline were added. Plus there is software that lets you ask things like, ”Why is the sky blue?” and get a list of entries likely to embody the answer. (Admittedly, Compton`s had to use data compression to get it all on, but this gives you some idea of the storage capacity.)
The only drawback to all this is that CD-ROMs, like floppy disks, are slow in computer terms. A standard hard disk drive can retrieve data in a fraction of the time a CD-ROM takes.
Meanwhile, back at the State Department . . .
Tinney added the department`s phone book to his disc, plus descriptions and pictures of 130 major overseas posts. And it still was less than half full.
”It`s becoming a very significant business tool, with about 3,000 commercial CD-ROM titles available right now, spanning everything from decades worth of cancer research literature to the entire nation`s phone books,” said E.J. McFaul.
McFaul is founder of the 6,000-member users` group SIG-CAT (Special Interest Group in CD-ROM Application Technology) and a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in Reston, Va.
”It`s gotten to where its very inexpensive to produce the discs, especially in a government setting where there are no copyrights to worry about,” he said.
”Unlike commercial on-line databases, there is no meter running as you peruse the data. And you`re looking at the data yourself-able to pose what-if questions, instead of depending on a librarian or other on-line expert to do the searching.”
McFaul noted the case of a NASA researcher who dropped plans to launch expensive upper-atmosphere probes when he found the data he needed on a CD-ROM from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
OK, you say. You have tons of data moldering in floppies or on archival tapes that you could put on a CD-ROM and make accessible to yourself or to your whole organization.
The problem is you don`t need to make hundreds of copies, so you can`t justify the $800 or so ”mastering” fee that precedes the $2-per-platter mass-reproduction cost.
Entrepreneurship to the rescue. A chain of shops is being planned for Canada and the U.S., based on the newly unveiled Philips 521 CD-ROM recorder. (No Chicago shop, however, is planned yet.)
”We expect these shops will be as common as print shops in 10 years,”
said Glenn Sanderese, customer service director for the original One-Off CD-ROM Shop, located in Calgary.
The 521 CD-ROM costs about $6,000 with software, compared with the $20,000 or more that similar units would have cost a year ago, and it records onto a special CD platter. The newly made CD-ROM can serve as your archive, or as a master disc for mass reproduction.
Prices start at about $125 for a partially full disc, with extra charges for handling multiple floppy disks. (One customer sent 800.)
”The most common use is just data backup. When (the) hard drive gets full you just turn it into a CD-ROM,” Sanderese said.
Computerized print shops are big users, he added, since they keep all customer files in case someone comes back for a second printing.
Allen Visual Systems in Northbrook has bought a 521 and plans to offer CD-ROM production services beginning late this year.
”There is a lot of interest,” said Doug Allen, account executive at Allen Visual. ”A big market would be people in (corporate data processing)
who need to transfer a large amount of data, or share large databases with other corporate divisions. A CD-ROM isnsferring 650 megabytes.”
So brace yourself, the avalanche is coming-all of it on clear little plastic platters.
