The rainbow collection: Random notes on consumer CD‐ROMS
| Pages | 87-112 |
| Date | 01 April 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047940 |
| Published date | 01 April 1994 |
| Author | Walt Crawford |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Trailing Edge #21
THE RAINBOW COLLECTION:
RANDOM NOTES ON CONSUMER CD-ROMS
Walt Crawford
Somehow, without loading up on games or
owning a sound card, the author has 28 CD-
ROMs at home, with more on the way.
How did all these discs get there and what do
they say (if anything) about the CD-ROM
marketplace? When are CD-ROMs marvelous
new publishing media, when are they essentially
compact diskette replacements, and when are
they wastes of good polycarbonate?
The author goes through his motley collection,
noting some highlights and some messy
situations.
After all this grumbling, the author adds notes
on the personal computing literature for April
through September 1994.
Here's a statistic for the death-of-print crowd: in
my home office, I now have the equivalent of roughly
15,000 full-length books stored on a group of nearly-
indestructible discs that can be stored in 52 cubic
inches, including protective sleeves. Clearly, print is
dead: long live the CD-ROM!
The numbers are correct, although
the
implication
is pure nonsense. I don't have the textual equivalent
of 15,000 books (each containing 100,000 words: that
is,
typical 300-page books) on CD-ROM, but the 28
CD-ROMs currently in my home office do contain a
total of just over 8,962,426,900 bytes: almost nine
gigabytes, where a full-length, pure-text book is
roughly 0.6 megabytes.
Relatively little of that nine gigabytes
is
text:
more
than one gigabyte, but less than two gigabytes. That's
still quite a bit, to be sure: the equivalent of more than
1,500 books, more books than we have around the
household (it's a small house; we can't maintain an
enormous book collection; and we do use the public
library). I do have two full-length, junior-grade
encyclopedias on
disc,
a
short "bookshelf of reference
works, ten years' worth of computer news reporting,
a years' worth of in-depth computer-related abstracts,
including full-text for quite a few periodicals, and
another year's worth of PC Magazine full-text. Does
that make me a convert to digital publishing? Not a
chance. It does make me a reasonably flexible user of
tools in various formats. I didn't buy the $29 CD-ROM
containing all of last year's Hugo and Nebula nominees,
Crawford is a senior analyst in the development
division of The Research Libraries Group, Inc., Mountain
View, California.
— THE RAINBOW COLLECTION —
ISSUE
48
—
12:4 (1994) 87
including half a dozen full-length science fiction novels:
I much prefer to read my science fiction in pulp
magazines, cheap paperbacks, and hardbacks from the
library.
There is a strong indication that reality is setting
in at CD-ROM and multimedia magazines, conferences,
and columns. People are beginning to realize that CD-
ROMs won't replace typical print books, but can very
well complement them (Twain's World is probably a
great way to look for passages by Samuel Clemens,
but a lousy way to read his books), just as digital
transmission doesn't make a reasonable replacement
for typical fiction and nonfiction books. CD-ROM has
many excellent uses (and some not-so-excellent ones),
although the biggest sales successes at this point seem
to be games.
With more than two dozen CD-ROMs on hand,
none of them bundled with my computer or CD-ROM
drive, this seems like a good time to look at what all
this polycarbonate does for me, and what it all means.
I offer some notes, plaudits, and gripes about the CD-
ROMs I have used and some random opinions about
the present and future CD-ROM marketplace.
Disclaimer: This article is not a set of CD-ROM
reviews, and I absolutely do not claim to be a CD-
ROM expert. If I was an expert, I probably wouldn't
have some of the complaints that I do. (Consider this
the Peter Jacsó disclaimer, if you've read the June 1994
DATABASE.) Even if I wanted to do full-scale reviews,
I can't: I don't have a sound card, which is crucial for
providing complete evaluations of some of these discs.
My "printist" bias should be well known by now.
But that bias is conditioned by what I see and what I
understand. When someone tells me that "all the book-
stores are converting from print to CD-ROM," I
wonder why the new Barnes & Noble superstore in
Redwood City has no CD-ROMs for sale (except for
those in the backs of magazines and books) and why
the Printers Inc bookstore in Mountain View has
something like five, on a good day. I work in Silicon
Valley; have we somehow been left behind in the
digital revolution?
THE
PLATFORM:
A QUICK
REVIEW
For any current software comments, and particu-
larly for CD-ROM notes, it's important to state the
platform. My home computing platform currently
consists of a big-name "IBM-compatible" computer
using an Intel 486DX2/66 CPU on a Micronics VESA
local-bus motherboard, with 256KB SRAM cache, 8MB
RAM, 340MB 13ms Western Digital hard disk attached
to a VL-bus enhanced IDE adapter, single-speed
caddyless Sony CD-ROM drive with proprietary
adapter, and ATI VL-bus Ultra Pro accelerated graphics
adapter (1MB VRAM) driving a 15" flat screen display
typically set for l,024-by-768 pixel 256-color Windows
graphics. There's also a 14,400bps modem/9,600bps
fax card, but that's irrelevant to these comments, as
is the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III with 4MB RAM
and Windows Printing System.
My primary software environment is Windows
3.1 running over MS-DOS 6.2 with MSCDEX, with
Smartdrive set for 2MB cache in DOS, 1MB cache in
Windows, write-back caching enabled. Note that this
version of Smartdrive does cache CD-ROM, and that's
made a considerable difference in performance for some
applications. I do not use DoubleSpace; I do use PC
Tools Delete Sentry, and I use PC Tools for Windows
Office as a replacement for Windows Program Manager
and File Manager. I use a permanent 6MB swap file,
32-bit disk I/O is enabled, and I don't use any wallpa-
per or screen
savers.
Typically, I only use one program
at a time (in addition to the PC Tools Crashguard and
Office/Multidesk). I normally keep from 30 to 50
TrueType faces active. Without applications open, I
typically have 77 percent of user resources available
before ill-behaved applications fail to restore what they
have used. (If this all seems like nonsense, welcome
to the curiosity that is Windows: you can use defaults,
but it helps to know what is going on behind the scenes
before complaining about slow response.)
It is fair to say that this system is fast and pleasant
for Windows software, even bloated old Word
6.0—and, surprisingly, my brief experiment with "too-
high" resolution has now continued for some months,
keeping Windows screen overhead to a minimum.
Why No Sound Card?
What isn't on the list above is a sound card. Some
day. But when I purchased the system, I didn't antici-
pate doing much game playing, and I still don't. Some
of the non-game CD-ROMs I now have could use a
sound card; indeed, there are demos and videos that
I can't watch without one. But to date, I don't find the
lack devastating, merely annoying at times. Meanwhile,
I hope and expect that I will soon be able to buy a good
sound card (with wavetable synthesis and full General
MIDI support) for a modest sum.
Not having a sound card does not mean that
I
can't
use sound on any CD-ROMs. For example, my wife
received a free copy of Loom, a nonviolent game that
uses beautiful music and some dialogue. All the sound
on the Loom CD-ROM is "Red Book" sound: regular
audio CD, playable through the headphone jack on the
drive. For that matter, when I installed Windows
Printing System it automatically installed an internal-
speaker WAV driver, which some (but not all) pro-
88
LIBRARY
HI
TECH
—
WALT
CRAWFORD
—
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