In <12423 at gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> steffen at mbcr.bcm.tmc.edu (David Steffen) writes:
>IMHO, CDs are an excellent distribution medium; they are cheap, rugged,
>and high capacity. However, they are slow. Given the current costs
>of high capacity hard drives, I think it would be worth distributing
>Medline on CD, but copying it to an institution-wide hard disk for
>searching.
I beleve that this is the system that is used for the biogopher
in basel. The databases are kept on SLOW CD-ROM and the indexes
are kept on fast disk. When you do a search on the indexes you
get the answer FAST, and then when you extract a record from the
database you go to the CD-ROM.
In one of the bionet newsgroups I mentioned an article in
Scientific American which discussed in depth the concept of
CD-ROM vs networking. Lipman from NCBI was all for CDROM,
and was not all that positive about networking solutions to
biocomputing problems.
Anyone interested in the CDROM/networking debate should read
this article. (Might be one or two months old)
RGDS -=ROB=-
--
Rob Harper / E-mail: harper at convex.csc.fi
Finnish State Computer Centre / Molbio/software: harper at nic.funet.fi
P.O. Box 40, SF-02101 Espoo / Telephone: +358 0 457 2076
Finland / Fax: +358 0 457 2302
