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.