The Secret of the Hybrid CDROM and 3 1/2 Floppy Drive!
Back in the day, before there was CD-RW's, there was the first prototype device that Panasonic released known as the PD-CDROM drive, featuring 650mb of rewritable optical media.
I bought one for approximately $500 back then, thinking I needed the space for data backups, etc. I also nievely thought this would become a standard and the price of the media would drop.
Well sadly, the industry instead decided to adopt the still current standard of CD, CDRW, etc.
Which then lead to DVD's and my complaint with all of them, but the original PD-CDROM!!
There's just so many things that can happen to all of these media types that make them so unreliable, from the more obvious and understandable scratches and bends to the really sad finger prints and dirt.
But, with just a few simple changes, these things become so unavoidable it almost guarantees the life of the media for what actually used to be guaranteed “LifeTime”.
Remember when cds first came out and they offered this type of guarantee? lol
Now you cant buy one take it home, it not work, and try to return it very easily because of “copy protection” laws.
Okay, now for the secret. The whole simple idea behind the PD-CDROM drive was to imiate something that was already in use - the 3 1/2 Floppy drive!
Here's the photo's to prove that at one time this thing actually used to exist:
Say good bye to jewel cases!!! Then, if they'd just keep making them smaller, hold more, and faster!
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.