24 Jun
1998
24 Jun
'98
2:20 p.m.
You mean like 78 rpm records, wax cylinders, 8-track
tapes, Playtape
cassettes, etc...
Or 33 and 45 rpm vinyl and cassettes. If you think these three formats, at
least two of which are getting rather elderly, are obsolete, think again.
Some of those were quite popular at one time.
But not nearly as popular as more modern mediums. The first two examples
date from a time when not every other person on the train has a personal
deck.
And even if CD's remain a common medium for music
(which is by no means
certain), that doesn't mean CD-ROMs will be available. It's not trivial
to modify a CD player into a CD-ROM drive. Possible, but not a 10 minute
project. I'd rather trust my data to a medium for which I could build a
reader from scratch if I had to. And there's not a single essential part
in a Trend reader that I couldn't recreate if I had to.
The hard part of a CD drive (either kind) is the head and servo system,
and if those parts work already, your almost all the way home. The format
for CDs is well documented. You could even decode everything in software,
once the entire bitstream of a CD is read.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net