Chapter 10 CD-ROM

You can often trace an industry to a single invention. Publishing started with the printing press; Recording started with the phonograph; Motion Pictures began with the movie camera. The heart of the Multimedia PC is its CD-ROM drive. Every Multimedia PC has a CD-ROM drive, which enables it to deliver large scale, content-rich titles quite easily.

CD-ROM stands for Compact Disc-Read Only Memory. The information used by a multimedia application is stored on a compact disc identical in size and appearance to an audio CD. You can only read data from a CD-ROM disc; you can't write information to it. The information contained on a CD-ROM is defined before the disc is manufactured. Once created, the CD-ROM disc remains unalterable for the rest of its existence.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

A brief discussion of CD-ROM technology

How CD-ROM technology should factor into title design

The process of publishing a title on a CD-ROM

Computers without a CD-ROM drive—even though they may provide marvelous technical capabilities—are limited to the reduced storage available with floppy disks, or to the expensive option of removable magnetic media. CD-ROM is cheap, it holds lots of information, and it is easy to distribute. CD-ROM makes the Multimedia PC an excellent platform for the delivery of multimedia titles.

This discussion is meant to provide an overview. For more detailed information, read through the CD-ROM series of books published by Microsoft PressÒ.