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Subject:Re: {Manuals on CD-ROM From:Fred M Jacobson <fred -at- BOOLE -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 6 Dec 1993 14:45:52 PST
Last week, Sharon wrote:
> The latest brilliant idea from marketing is to put all our manuals on CD-ROM.
> (By way of bacround, our company sells peripherals and software for the
> VAX market.) I think this would be a wonderful opportunity to do cutting-edge
> technology. However, what they want to do is to merely PUT them on CD-ROM;
with
> no navigation tools or special formatting. Kind of like microfiche.
> ...
There have already been a number of good replies, including "horror
stories" about "no navigation tools." What I just noticed was that
doc dumped onto CD-ROM is not "like microfiche," but like microfilm.
^^^^
That is, CD-ROM with no navigation is completely sequential, and
probably considerably slower than zipping through the reel of microfilm
searching for a page number. Paper documentation, of course, is not
limited to sequential access.
-Fred
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