Information Sources
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Some people, when seeing this, have sent me messages saying
things like ªHow did you get access to NeXT's internal source!º.
Well, it's simple.  I didn't.  Here's where I got the information used
to write this program.

¬	In /NextDeveloper/Examples/UNIX there is a very simple command-line program called SCSI_CD.  Well, actually, it's just the subroutines.  Apparently I had to come up with a main program to drive them, though to be honest I don't remember where I got my initial main program (which was about 100 lines) from.  Perhaps it was in NS-3.0 but it's not on NS-3.2?  If not, then either I wrote it or someone NeXT-mailed it to me.

¬	I tried playing with that as a unix command-line program, but decided I might as well have a NeXTSTEP user-interface, so I reworked things a bit to do that.  Technically though, this is still just a program I'm using to test SCSI commands on CD-ROM drives.  It just looks like a music-CD player program...

¬	Trying to guess at SCSI commands was beyond my ability.  I called up the Sony Corp. and they sent me a document called "CD-ROM Drive, SCSI Interface Manual, Model CDU-541 and CDU-6211".  Note that the CD-ROM drive that NeXT used to sell (and which I have) is the SONY CD-ROM CDU-541.

¬	Looking for more information on SCSI-2 command formats in particular, I checked out newsgroup alt.cd-rom.  That pointed me at anonymous ftp site ncrinfo.ncr.com, which has text versions of scsi-descriptions down in /pub/standards/io.  I downloaded the file that described SCSI-2.

¬	I then realized this was a 17-megabyte file, for a text-only rendition of the SCSI-2 standard.  From either alt.cd-rom or from this text version I got the phone number of Global Engineering Documents, and ordered the official working-document version of the SCSI-2 standard.

¬	The name mCD was chosen simply because one of the other NeXTSTEP applications I've worked on is called pCD.  Later on someone pointed me to an X-based application called xmcd.  I have not looked at this yet, and mCD is not related to xmcd.  I believe xmcd supports quite a few more CD-ROM drives than mCD does though, so perhaps I should look into it.

¬	The current database in mCD is pretty lame.  I am working on implementing something more meaningful using the Indexing kit.  For clues on how to use the indexing kit, I've been looking at /NextDeveloper/Examples/IndexingKit/Ledger.

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