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From: jon@jim.odr.oz (Jon Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: ECDROM (was Re: SURPRISE Everyone!!! the 2080 is out!)
Message-ID: <512@jim.odr.oz>
Date: 21 Jun 88 05:17:28 GMT
References: <5566@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Organization: O'Dowd Research Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, Australia.
Lines: 62

From article <5566@xanth.cs.odu.edu>, by kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Kent Paul Dolan):
> 
> Kent, the man from xanth.
> 
> 	Of course, you'd have to have  two drives; nothing else is suitable
> 	for backups, and doing a  one  drive backup   with 12 megabytes  of
> 	Amiga memory is 84 or so disk swaps; bad case of swappers' shoulder
> 	from that little trick.

No no no, what you do is build yourself a large circulating memory device.
Take one high powered lasers and small amount of buffer memory.

Point the laser at the moon and look for the reflections.

Now it's about 246k miles to the moon if you allow about two thirds of this
for active data time that gets you about two seconds worth of data.
If you can tramsit at ~1Gbs thats 256k bytes or so of data storage.

You should be able set up a data framing format such that you can insert
a lump of data and let it circulate for any amount of time while you
swap disks.

This has several dis-advantages over using large mos-memory devices,
some of which are quite attractive.

  1. You have to swap the disks far more often, thus reducing
     the likelyhood of actually doing a backup.

  2. Your electricity bill would quite high, thus increasing
     the profits of the service provider which then requires that
     the provider pay more tax thus reducing direct personal tax,right.

  3. It only works when the moon is out, full-moon might be
     appropriate.

  4. Data integrity could be as good as a telephone line.

  5. Increasing the systems bandwidth would cost heaps.
     I'm not sure how but you should be able to find a
     way of using multiple links. So if one was to build a system
     with about 4000 lasers you could store the entire contents
     of the cdrom in one lump. This does of cause contradict
     point 1.

  6. You would probably have to buy a small lump of the
     moon in order to have an area to yourself. This could lend
     to great advances in commercial space flight, you know the
     odd trip to talk over the deal with the real-estate agent etc.

  7. Your data would still get mixed up with every one elses'.
     A great boon for the anti-privacy lobby.

  8. Network traffic would be greatly reduced as everyone could
     `see' all the other data, `look and you shall see??'

jon


-- 
Jon Wells @ O'Dowd Research P/L.  Ph: 03-562-0100 Fax: 03-562-0616

Rogue isn't the only place that leprechauns steal your gold!