Technologies:

A PC Guide That Won’t, Technically, make your Head Explode.

by Rob Cheng and Bill Zahren

CD-ROM Drives
(Groovy and happenin' in a far out way)

Everyone knows at least one person who always plays funky tunes at his hip and happenin' home pad. You know, the guy who is always talking about how this new jazz guitar artist really blew him away at the local coffee house last night, or raving about the latest CD by some musician you never even heard of playing an instrument you never even heard of.

Inside your PC, that hipster is the CD-ROM drive.

The CD-ROM is the one device that has the rare privilege of being able to move freely within both the audio and PC worlds. It just swaggers in the door and throws itself into a chair, runs its hands through its hair and says, "What's up, baby?"

Of course, true to Bill and Rob's Rule of PCs, the CD-ROM is horribly misnamed. It stands for "Compact Disc - Read Only Memory." But a CD-ROM is not memory at all. It's storage, like a hard drive. It should be called a CD-ROS (Read Only Storage). But, nobody asked Bill and Rob what to name this device. NOOOOOO. We were not on the memo list when that E-mail went out. Not that we're bitter.

Anyway, the coming of the CD-ROM to PCs was so huge, just trying to fathom it causes lightheadedness due to a major lack of blood in the brain.

First, the CD is the software storage medium that blew the doors off the ubiquitous 3.5" floppy diskette (any time you can use the word "ubiquitous," you should.) Floppies hold 1.44MB of data each. Just one CD holds some 600MBs. You do the math.

OK, we'll do the math. If you have a 50MB program, it would take only about 45 diskettes to hold it (unless you compressed the files and then uncompressed them when you load the program and what a nightmare that would be.) You could put 10 of those 50MB programs on just one CD. On top of all that, CD-ROM drives can transfer data off the disk a trillion times faster than floppies can deliver data.

Besides making loading software faster and more convenient than the 3.5" diskette method, software companies love the CD because it's generally a one-way deal. Until very recently, very few people could record data from their PC onto a CD. So when the CD first came out as a storage medium, software companies did little jigs because it made programs harder to pirate than floppy-based software. (The industry term for "copying" or "ripping off" is "pirating." Arrr, Matie.)

The second thing CD-ROM drives did was lead to the rise of "cool" as a major part of the PC vocabulary. The CD-ROM used to just hang out in dark clubs (audio CD-ROM players) wearing its shades and going off on riffs with his electric guitar until 5 a.m. and no one paid much attention to him. BUT THEN, one day, some fancy-shmancy computer company (GATEWAY 2000!) said, "HEY, this thing is really good. We should give him a gig in all our desktop PCs."

Next thing you know, CD-ROM had concert deals, limos, groupies, bodyguards, booking agents. Everyone loved what it could do. Now it's in virtually every new computer, which explains why when you open the CD-ROM door and listen real closely, you'll hear "cool, baby."

Gateway didn't invent the CD-ROM drive, but back in July 1994 we were the first major computer maker to make it standard equipment. CD-ROM drives had actually been around for quite a while before they burst into the mainstream. The reason for the delay was that a bunch of engineers wearing lab coats were too busy battling a raging pocket protector fire to get CD-ROM drives to the market. No. We're making that up. The fire was not tragic. We're still kidding. There was no fire.

What really happened, as far as we can figure out after many, expense-account-funded martinis, was that it took a rise in public demand for CD-ROM stuff to get it into the mainstream. Making these huge discoveries is why we get the big money. What really did the trick was multimedia adventure games that featured interesting music, great images and an interactive format in which you had to make decisions that affected what you heard and saw.

Playing those interactive games full of sound and video requires relatively huge data space, because video and sound are bloated data pigs that eat up disk space faster than hogs put away ground corn. Besides space, multimedia also requires PCs to retrieve and process data really, really fast in order to make everything dance and sing on the screen.

The combination of a cranking CD-ROM drive and ultra-muscular Big Unit (CPU) made the multimedia double play needed to get us out of the monomedia inning, which lasted most of the '80s.

We love floppies, but they're just way, way too small and slow for multimedia. When people started expecting their PCs to talk to them and play music as well as display cool pictures and graphics, that's when the CD-ROM drive slouched through the PC door, guitar over its shoulder, eyes shielded by very dark glasses, and took a seat near the floppy drive.

The way CD-ROM drives work is pretty simple (we use the term "simple" loosely). A laser beam inside the drive shoots onto the spinning disc. There's all kinds of light refracting and physics going on which you don't want to know about as long as it all works. The scientific stuff reads the data off the disk and then shoots it to the memory or CPU where all the fun breaks loose.

Like everything else in a PC, the major question about CD-ROM concerns speed. Doesn't it always come back to speed? Sure it does. Faster, faster, faster. How fast can the CD-ROM drive read data and get it out to the Big Unit? CD-ROM drives are actually pretty straightforward about their speed. The original CD-ROM drive for computers read data at 180 kilobytes per second (kps). Two years a go it was ultra fast, now it's what we call "kinda slow." Today, you'll see 8X and even 12X CD-ROM drives. That means the drive reads at eight or 12 times faster than the original. Let's do some more math. Carry the one . . . OK, a 12X reads at 2160kbs per second. Sssssssssmokin' compared to the original 180kbs.

How fast a CD-ROM drive reads data is a function of how fast the disc spins and some controller stuff like "algorithms" which we cannot go into or we'll have to go back on medication for a year. Mainly it comes down to rotation speed. Take our word for it.

The 8X and 12X spin so fast you can actually hear them running up to speed when you first put the disk in. In fact, the 12X goes so fast that people with the more sensitive ears may furrow their brows at the resulting sound of a 12X running wide open. Nothing to worry about. When something spins at 5,000 rpm, it tends to hum.

Do you need all this rotational speed? We can categorically say, "It depends." OK, we're feeling brave today, so we'll change that to "probably." Those are the kinds of definitive answers you'll get from us. If you just plan to listen to audio disks while working on stuff stored in your hard drive, you don't need a world-altering CD-ROM drive because audio CDs don't spin very fast. Rob actually has a 1X CD-ROM drive his office PC that works fine for audio CDs. It still has hieroglyphics where primitive man installed it.

But, lots of multimedia games have to draw data from the hard drive and CD-ROM drive to work. Then your drive speed really means something. The bigger number before the "X" the better.

And, of course, we always mash up against that desire to make your PC useful for 30 years. It's a pretty safe bet that tomorrow's software will get larger and more complex. Future multimedia stuff will be more ornate and zany than ever and will need faster and faster CD-ROM drives and ever huger processors to be able to make the magic.

One last question you might face is "IDE or SCSI?"

First of all, SCSI (which hyper-cool computer people pronounce "skuzzy") has to be one of our favorite acronyms. "Feeling SCSI? Call Gateway." Ha. We love it.

Anyway, IDE stands for "Integrated Device Electronics." (At this point we've typed "stands for" so many times we're going to program our keyboards to automatically type the phrase with the push of one button. Thought you might like to know.) SCSI stands for "Small Computer System Interface." You can buy IDE or SCSI hard drives as well.

The difference has to do with the location of the stuff that controls the drive. With IDE, the controller is built right into the drive. With SCSI stuff, it's on a separate card that almost always comes with the device.

Generally, if you have an IDE hard drive, you'll want an IDE CD-ROM. Most CD-ROMs sold commercially today are IDE. But, if you have a SCSI hard drive, you'll want a SCSI CD-ROM drive.

In that case, when you open the drive and listen close, the hep-cat CD-ROM drive will probably let out a puff of cigarette smoke and say, "This is skuzzy, baby."

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