Optical discs in the computer world

1987/06/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Periferikoak

Optical discs are well known in the world of electronics, but lately they have also had a great success in the computer field. The interchangeability offered by the flexible disks or floppy disks, and the capacity of the hard disks, offer them simultaneously.

There are several types of optical discs: those intended exclusively for reading (OORM, Optical Only Read Memories), those that allow you to write once and read often (WORM, Write Once Read Many) and those that allow you to read and write as many times as you want (WMRA, Write Many Read Always). The most used currently is the second. Theoretically the third modality would be the most interesting, but still does not give excessively satisfactory results and its price is too high.

The usual thing in working with this type of devices or devices is to use the hard disk as a working disk and store programs that should only be read on the optical disk, taking advantage of the knowledge of both the hard disk and the optical. However, in addition to serving as support for hard drives, it can be thought that they can be appropriate for other applications.

For example, it may be possible to keep text and images interspersed, and on the other hand, these discs can be sent by mail without any problems, making an exchange of information between different computers. In this field, it is possible to access the price competition with telecommunications networks.

As for optical disks, last year Microsoft indicated version 3.10 of the MS-DOS operating system and its subsequent adaptation. More than an adaptation, it would be to add a part that internalizes the management of optical discs.

Optical discs can have a capacity of 500 Mbytes.