On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Michael Sharp wrote: > I got an idea while driving home tonight (industrial music blasting away, > unwinding from a hectic day, can you relate?) > > How hard would it be to make a wearable computer with a Ton-O-RAM (tm) on > it, and make a CD-Rom as a hard drive? Of course you would have to use some > of the ram for a swap file, and for what ever you happen to be > running/editing/modifying at the moment. But my point is this: CD-Roms are > cheaper (and more durable?) than hard drives. And applications can run from > a CD. CDs hold a nice 640M of data, so, disk space wouldnt be a real > problem. CD-Rom drives would probably require less energy to run as well. > Oh, and what about saving data? Well, unless your CD happens to be a burner > (and you might as well get a hard drive at that point) your only options > would be either battery-backed ram, or eeprom. Ultimately, you would > download the data from the wearable to a base computer via serial > port/modem/i.r. link etc. > > Could Linux be made to operate in this fashion? Aren't RedHat install cd's 5.x bootable? This seems doable, but the power requirements for a cd might be higher then a hdd, not to mention the biggest drawback being you have to constantly burn cds to add apps, services, etc. Not to mention the fact that you can't store any new data on your wearable (unless you have some cleaver memory backup power scheme). Seems like this would only be useful with a fast network connection. If you could combine a cd bootable os, and a 3" cdrom drive that might make a great wearable. -Paul -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
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