Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/3/84; site harvard.ARPA Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!crane From: crane@harvard.ARPA (Greg Crane) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: laser disks and massive cheap storage Message-ID: <80@harvard.ARPA> Date: Fri, 5-Oct-84 16:37:03 EDT Article-I.D.: harvard.80 Posted: Fri Oct 5 16:37:03 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 7-Oct-84 21:43:18 EDT Distribution: net Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard Lines: 32 What is the actual current state of laser disks out there? Does anybody have any first hand experience with them? Who is offering them? How big and how expensive? How slow are the access and transfer rates? Any predictions about when they will be ready? My specific applications call for massive amounts of on-line storage, and occasional spikes of CPU intensive work (mostly looking up things in inverted indices, but occasional linear searches of one to several hundred mbytes of text). The ideal configuration would be a network of 68020's, each with a laser disk, each running some form of UNIX, and accessible to a large variety of small machines (MAC's or IBM PC's). There is a significant market, I think, for a system of this type. Also, if you have a large read-only disk, with a decent transer rate but murderously slow access time, you don't need a fancy file system that is set up to allow you to change files efficiently. You could just start off by running the 4.2 file system with a large block size (40 or 64K), but does anybody know whether it would be worthwhile to avoid the file system altogether and just write something simpler? Anybody out there working on a system that fits this general description? Anybody out there with a 68000 UNIX box ready to slap on a Shugart laser disk or whatever as soon as such a disk becomes readily available? If everybody else is too busy getting rich with CAD/CAM applications, anybody out there willing to support development of such a system if nobody is working on it? Gregory Crane Widener Library Harvard University