Hot Mix and HyCD: A Success Story
The answer is not important, but the ramifications are. What is remarkable is
that no matter what hardware and operating system you are using to access this
disc, what you see appears native to your system. You do not have to consider
whether or not this CD-ROM is one that your system can read, any more than you
have to consider whether your system can access a certain site on the Internet.
If that seems only sensible and the way things should be, you are right. But it
has not always been that way.
Until about four years ago, the Silicon Graphics sales force used a printed
software catalog, updated every year, to provide information about Silicon
Graphics hardware and software to their customers. The problems with printed
catalogs for software are that they are expensive, bulky, inconvenient, not
easily updated, and totally inadequate for demonstrating software programs and
hardware capabilities. CD-ROM, however, is inexpensive, compact, efficient, and
the ideal medium, due to its capacity and durability, on which to distribute an
electronic catalog of software demos with text, graphics, audio, and animation.
Hot Mix, now in its fourteenth edition, was originally created as a sales tool
for Silicon Graphics, and as an advertising venue for Silicon Graphics software
developers. This disc contains software demos and applications for Silicon
Graphics systems from more than 30 software vendors in the Silicon Graphics
Developers Program. In its early days, the disc was only available in the
native Silicon Graphics file format, EFS (Extended File System). That was
logical; surely the best market for Silicon Graphics applications are the owners
of Silicon Graphics systems. The Hot Mix disc was given away at trade shows, and
bundled with Silicon Graphics desktop systems.
For Joe Ushana, technical guru of the Hot Mix project, making a single
platform-specific CD-ROM was a good solution, but it could be better. He noticed
that people without Silicon Graphics systems, but who might be considering
buying them, had no way to learn about the power and versatility of Silicon
Graphics hardware and applications. Wouldn't it be a great idea, he thought, to
expand the audience for the Hot Mix disc by making a disc that would play on
non-Silicon Graphics platforms? The only drawback would be the necessity of
making a unique CD-ROM for each platform, which would not only be costly, but
impractical. If only he could offer a hands-on, take-home demonstration disc
with the cross-platform capabilities of the Internet, all contained on single
compact disc. Such a disc would appeal to vendors who advertised on the disc, it
would give the sales team a valuable tool that would run on their laptops as
well as on customers' machines, and it would expose Mac users, Windows users,
and UNIX users alike to the virtues of the Silicon Graphics environment.
Although CD-ROM has always been the single most standardized storage medium ever
developed, that standardization has come at a price. Every CD-ROM drive is
physically capable of reading any CD-ROM disc, but in order for the system that
hosts the drive to be able to access the disc logically, a
CD-ROM-specific logical file format is required. The CD-ROM format, ISO 9660, was designed
as a compromise format that would be readable by Mac, UNIX and DOS operating
systems. This required a "lowest common denominator" approach - and so the
file-naming conventions and other attributes of ISO 9660 work best and appear
most "at home" on a DOS-based platform. ISO 9660 did not offer a way to include
the Macintosh data fork and resource fork, and it did not allow the long
filenames and multiple directories characteristics of UNIX.
Early CD-ROM developers for Macintosh and UNIX naturally found these
restrictions unsatisfactory. They either created CD-ROM applications in the
native file format of their operating system, or they created partitioned
"hybrid" discs. Partitioned hybrid discs were a mixed blessing. Discs can
contain two or more partitions, with each partition containing duplicate data,
in the native file format for which it is intended. A partitioned hybrid disc
for two platforms limits the capacity for each platform to half the disc; for
three platforms, to a third. Because there were, until recently, few data
retrieval or viewer programs that could access DOS, Windows, Mac, and UNIX
files, a single shared dataset was not an option. Another serious drawback was
the fact that any hybrid disc with a Mac partition had to be created on a
Macintosh computer.
Paul Ling, president and CEO of Creative Digital Research, had a better idea.
"The Internet", he said, "is cross-platform and can be accessed by any type of
computer. HyCD lets title developers and Internet users make a CD-ROM disc that
is just as easily and seamlessly accessible on different platforms as the
Internet."
HyCD is the name of a true shared hybrid CD-ROM format created with CDR
Publisher software. CDR Publisher runs on PCs under Windows 3.1, Windows NT, and
Windows 95, as well as on Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations and their
respective operating systems. It is the only CD-ROM software that runs on all
Silicon Graphics operating system versions, from 5.2 to 6.2. The recording
software allows the user to select the platforms to be included, and creates a
CD-ROM which appears native to each of them. Best of all, because the data is
shared, each platform can fully utilize the entire capacity of the disc.
Naturally, when Joe Ushana heard about HyCD, he realized it was the way to
create a universally accessible sales tool that would put Hot Mix's advertisers'
products in front of the widest possible audience. And when Paul Ling saw
Hot Mix, he recognized it as the ideal way to demonstrate the versatility and value
of HyCD, as well as an outstanding marketing medium for CDR Publisher software.
The result of Joe's vision and Paul's innovation is now spinning in your CD-ROM
drive. And it was made possible by Creative Digital Research's CDR Publisher
software with HyCD.