The CDROM, first introduced in the late 1970's is a player of compact discs which has the ability to be linked to a computer via a standard connection system. Once connected, a disc containing computer data is placed in the drive and the data is transferred into the computer memory, thus acting as a mass storage device.
It is the ability of each compact disc to store up to 250,000 pages of text which is making the CDROM drive and associated discs a more and more popular format for storage of computer information. The information is stored in digital form on a compact disc. This along with their durability make them ideal for the purpose of data storage and distribution.
The term CDROM is a acronym for Compact Disc Read Only Memory. Read only because once the data is written to the disk at the time of mastering it cannot be changed, only read from the disc into the computer. This drawback, however, is soon to be overcome with the advent of a re-writable compact disc system, already available in a non-standard limited form as WORM (Write Once Read Many) and Magneto Optical drives.
