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Date: Sun 12-Dec-1991 23:07:14 From: cnh5730@maraba.tamu.edu (Charles Herrick) Subject: Extolling the virtues of Optical Drives (was: Infoworld Rumors) In article <l?4Hj3374@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) > The optical drive will become popular on all machines over the next > two to three years. OS/2, Windows NT, and the Apple/IBM OS will/do > require more disk space. Hopefully by the end of the decade optical > storage will have decreased enough in price that software will be > distributed on it. Large "multimedia" application will help quick the > acceptance of optical storage. > > Basically, I hope NeXT doesn't overlook a great technology just > because it wasn't ready when they were. > What's the problem... if it's a SCSI device, just plug 'n' play, right? Well, almost... except that unless the device manufacturer of the optical drive does something incredibly forward-thinking, your basic generic SCSI device driver won't drive the optical device. And you can't roll your own device driver on the NeXT if it's for a SCSI device, so then what do you do? This relates to the forward-thinking part mentioned previously. Check out Ten X, a small company in Austin, TX... they make a device controller interface for SCSI optical drives that allows an optical device to masquerade as a common SCSI Winchester (read: hard disk). Voila, instant compatibility!:-) Problems? The price :-( However, now you're independent of whether NeXT does or does not decide to "support the technology." If you want it, you buy it, you got it. Yay, SCSI.
Date: Sun 13-Dec-1991 13:58:48 From: jiro@shaman.com (Jiro Nakamura) Subject: Re: Extolling the virtues of Optical Drives (was: Infoworld Rumors) The NeXT SCSI Drive device driver supports the standard SCSI commands needed to drive a SCSI magneto optical drive. These are the normal SCSI ones combined with the Eject and media present commands. The problem is: Getting the media initialized. Most MO's need a special command sequence to initialize the media for the first time (preformatting). This is a pain unless you have a special utility, which is what my company is developing right now. News at 11. - jiro
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.