laser disks and massive cheap storage

[Greg Crane]

What is the actual current state of laser disks out there? Does anybody
have any first hand experience with them? Who is offering them? How 
big and how expensive? How slow are the access and transfer rates?
Any predictions about when they will be ready?

My specific applications call for massive amounts of on-line storage, and 
occasional spikes of CPU intensive work (mostly looking up 
things in inverted indices, but occasional linear searches of
one to several hundred mbytes of text). The ideal configuration
would be a network of 68020's, each with a laser disk, each running
some form of UNIX, and accessible to a large variety of small machines
(MAC's or IBM PC's).

There is a significant market, I think, for a system of this type. 
Also, if you have a large read-only disk, with a decent transer rate
but murderously slow access time, you don't need a fancy
file system that is set up to allow you to change files efficiently.
You could just start off by running the 4.2 file system with a large
block size (40 or 64K), but does anybody know whether it would be
worthwhile to avoid the file system altogether and just write something
simpler?

Anybody out there working on a system that fits this general description?
Anybody out there with a 68000 UNIX box ready to slap on a Shugart laser
disk or whatever as soon as such a disk becomes readily available?
If everybody else is too busy getting rich with CAD/CAM applications,
anybody out there willing to support development of such a system if
nobody is working on it?

						Gregory Crane
						Widener Library
						Harvard University