Re: Somewhat OT question about CD-ROM speeds

>> According to the best information I've seen available in both English and
>> Japanese, the requirement was dictated by the then chairman of Sony whose
>> favorite piece of music, Beethoven's 9th, took ~74 minutes to play.    The
>> official speed of 1X is 150 KB/sec and transferring 650 MB (the official
>> full disk) in 74 minutes requires 149.9+ KB/Sec.  The numbers do add up.
>
>But it was, as far as I know, Phillips that required CD-ROM drives to be 1X
>only.   They were required to be able to play audio CD's, and only at 1X.

It seems that today, (when the fact that a computer has a
CD-ROM drive is as obvious as it having memory or a
CPU,) is easy to forget that compact disks were conceived
as higher quality replacement for cassette tapes, and that,
at the beginning of time, CD players/drives were available
for music only, not as computer peripherals.

(There were other optical drives, but the formats were
incompatible and the media cost was much higher, way
above what the market would pay for a mass produced
successor to cassette tapes as the means to distribute
music)

And of course, all of them had to work at the same speed, in
the same way that cassette tape decks must run at the same
speed if you want to transfer media from one to another. 

The demand for higher speed drives ('N' times 150 Kbit/sec)
did not exist until they began to be used for software distribution.

R.W.