Le Club Macintosh de MontrƯal Publication: InterFace Issue: Unknown Author: Eric Tremblay Series: None Title: The Essential Drive ------------------------------------ The Essential Drive By Eric "E.T." Tremblay August 15, 1992 For those of you who have a NeXT computer and still don't have your CD-ROM drive, well you waited a little too long because NeXT had a special promotion that ended on July 31 that made the purchase of the drive very attractive. NeXT was selling it's CD-ROM drive at $695US (a $200US reduction from the retail price) and was including a free upgrade to NeXTSTEP 3.0 (a $295US value). Yes, you can still purchase a CD-ROM for your NeXT but it's going to cost you about $495 US more than if you had bought it during the special promotion. If you're like me, your CD-ROM drive is already sitting beside your computer waiting anxiously for NeXTSTEP 3.0 to arrive. As you can see, peripherals on a NeXT computer are priced fairly, and are not out of reach for the regular computer user. The day I received my drive I was a little disappointed to find that the CD-ROM drive is not a complete package. What I mean is that the drive comes with only an empty CD-caddy and a book explaining how to install the drive, nothing else. This means I had to order a SCSI cable and a SCSI terminator in order to hook up the drive to my computer. Even after finding all the missing cables I still could not test my new drive because I had no CD-ROM disc. I expected a sample CD-ROM disc with some press releases and product information or better yet some programs to let me try out my new drive. Nothing! I was expecting a lot more from NeXT, to say the least. The NeXT CD-ROM is in fact a Sony CDU-541 drive packaged in a sleek black casing with the familiar NeXT logo. Also found on the front panel is a plug for headphones and a headphone level control, plus a red busy indicator and finally an eject button. As with all NeXT equipment, the drive comes with a universal power supply that can automatically adjust to the voltages used in different countries. The specifications for the data transfer rate is a sustained rate of 150KB/sec and a burst rate of 1200KB/sec. When a CD-ROM disc is inserted into the drive an icon appears in the file viewer giving you access to the information found on the disc. I was pleasantly surprised by the speed at which it accesses or copies files. The current release of NeXTSTEP 2.1 gives the drive the ability to read ISO 9660 discs which is also called the High Sierra format. A little history before we go on, the High Sierra format gets its name from the location of the first meeting on it: the High Sierra Hotel at Lake Tahoe. Later this format was slightly modified and then approved by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the International Standards Organization (ISO), even though the two specifications are slightly different. The High Sierra format is much more commonly referred to as ISO 9660. NeXTSTEP 3.0 will be distributed in CD-ROM format only. It is said that the current beta release of NeXTSTEP 3.0 contains 345MB of information leaving plenty of free space for new developers' examples and demos. The true advantage of the CD-ROM drive will be when NeXT releases its NeXTSTEP 3.0 operating system. The really interesting feature of NeXTstep 3.0 concerning the CD-ROM drive will be its ability to recognize three new CD-ROM formats. These are Rockridge (which is an extension of the ISO 9660 format.), the Macintosh Hierarchical File System (HFS), and a NeXT proprietary format. The fact that NeXT supports all these formats makes the NeXT a leader in CD-ROM technology. NeXT and Sun are the only vendors to presently support the Rockridge format. Other vendors are expected to follow their lead and therefore establish the Rockridge format as the standard unix CD-ROM format. Let's hope that software developers will take advantage of the NeXTs CD-ROM drive and it's multimedia capabilities to bring us some truly amazing applications in the near future. SoftPC MS-DOS emulation is available on the NeXT; unfortunately the current version 2.05.5 does not support the CD-ROM drive as it should. SoftPC can read on the drive through its File Sharing Architecture, but that's where it ends. Having access to a directory on the CD-ROM is not enough; what is truly needed is support for the Microsoft CD Extensions (MS-CDEX). When this vital need is met, the NeXT will be able to read all of the CD-ROM front-ends found on most IBM-specific discs. During a telephone conversation I had with Insignia Solutions, they said that there was no short-term plans to upgrade SoftPC to support the CD-ROM drive. Things are really starting to get rolling on the NeXT and several companies have announced that they will sell a disc with NeXT public domain software on it. One of them is a company called ISOMedia inc. Their disc is called The Internet Unplugged which includes all the NeXT public domain software and Usenet articles found on the Internet network. All of that for an affordable $80US. Also Paget Press, the publishers of the AppWrapper magazine, will now be distributing quarterly a CD-ROM with their magazine and some demo programs (abandoning the printed version in favor of CD-ROM distribution). I have already ordered the two above products but in the mean-time I'll have to be content with my other CD-ROM discs filled withMS-DOS and MacIntosh treasures. All in all, a CD-ROM drive is essential to the health and happiness of your NeXT computer. I am sure that this device will be very useful in the future; certainly it will become very important once NeXTSTEP 3.0 comes out. CD-ROM has proven it's value on other platforms. It's the best way to distribute large amounts of information at an affordable price. I think that a lot of software in the future will be distributed via this media on the NeXT. If you only need one reason to buy a CD-ROM drive, here it is: NeXTSTEP 3.0.