About a year ago, I wrote a column saying by Christmas 1995 we'd be able to buy CD-ROM recorders for $500 and blank CDs for 5 bucks.
Okay, I was close. The cheapest I've seen recorders selling for is $750 and discs are about $7.But considering recorders cost more than $4,000 only a few years ago, the price drop has been astonishing. And prices are only going down.
I spent about a month with a Plasmon Data Systems RF4102 CD recorder just to get a feel for how CD recording works. Can CDs be made at home, with real world equipment? Will we be using CDs as backup devices and tossing those old tape drives?
Yup.
In that month I made only one "golden Frisbee," the industry term for a CD-ROM ruined during the "burn" process. That disc was tanked because my computer's screen saver kicked in during recording.
But the devil is in the details. It's simple to make a CD-ROM. What's not so simple is getting the data ready to process.
In order to work correctly, your system has to be able to feed data in a steady stream to the recorder. If your system slows down, such as when the screen saver kicks in, that CD is ruined. You have only one chance.
The Plasmon drive I borrowed had 2 megs of memory on board, sort of a staging area for data. If your computer (and hard drives) are fast enough to keep that buffer filled, then your disc will be made correctly.
I tried it with a 486 DX2-66 and a Pentium 60, each with normal hard drives and 16 megs of RAM. The process worked flawlessly and I managed to pack 660 megs of data on each disc. That's about 550 floppies worth.
The drive I used was a basic double-speed model, which produced my CDs in about 30 minutes. There also are 4X and 6X models which can burn discs much faster, but faster drives require faster computers and in some cases even high speed "staging" drives that buffer your data.
The instructions I got with the software, Easy CD Pro, was good; I remembered to defragment my hard disk and turn off all the other applications I had running before starting the burn. (And disable the screen saver!)
The software works just like the old File Manager in Windows 3.1. You drag and drop the files or directories you want on the CD into one window. When you've filled up the CD, the software scans all the files to make sure the names conform to industry standards. Then you can perform a "test" burn to make sure all is well.
Hard drive speed wasn't that critical with the double-speed drive; I even left some files on a Syquest removable drive and it was fast enough for the Plasmon.
What are CD recorders good for? Besides backups, you can distribute huge data files, collections of sound bites, lots of photos, even make your own audio CDs to listen to in the car.
Plasmon makes a whole series of drives, from basic to professional. Contact them at (408) 956-9400.
- CALL OF THE WEEK: If your office is like mine, we never know where anyone else is. All the "sign-out" systems we've ever tried have gone down in flames; people just can't remember to sign in and out.
Touch N' Go is out to change all that. It's an electronic version of the "In and Out" board that runs on your company network or on a central PC in your office.
In addition to signing in and out, workers can add comments or other remarks. The current version handles up to 20 workers; a version for 100 workers is under development.
You can download a working demo on the Internet at "http://touchngo.com/tng/tng.htm"
It's $99.95; you can call Touch N' Go at (907) 264-6333 or e-mail to "touchngo touchngo.com".
- NEWSGROUP PICK: "alt.my.head.hurts" for those with noisy neighbors, migraines or a hangover.
- WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Use Netscape Navigator to visit Hillary's Hair "http://www.hillaryshair.com" before the Secret Service finds out.
(James S. Derk is computer research editor for The Evansville Courier in Indiana and co-sysop of Courier Online. His e-mail address is JDERK evansville.net)