[68] in bcs-newton
Re: Stored Ink for Reporters
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Rinaldo)
Thu Mar 25 10:45:49 1993
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 93 11:05:38 EST
From: bcs_jim@MIT.EDU (Jim Rinaldo)
To: bcs-newton@world.std.com
But Sam;
you must realize how bad a stain digital ink makes when it explodes in
one's pocket! You have to use special soap to get those bits out.
There's a whole sub-genre of digital pocket protectors, Digital India,
Ink-stained wretch-bytes, Digital Devils...
I heard the Gillette-Parker pen deal was hung up over this *very* issue;
Parker didn't want to turn over their vats of DI to Gillette, to be used
in Gillette's pens. Or is that Pen Gillette?
The other (serious) question is does one want to keep all those ink bits
around for later "transcription" ? There was a bit of bit-figuring done
by CarlManning:
<< = 14.5 hrs of continuous uncompressed ink per 20Mbyte PCMCIA card>>
Note: There is no source of cheap small 20meg storage yet. Mid-94ish
maybe, sooner if more things take off. PCMCIA seems to be advancing
because a lot of different folks want to use it, from Applied
Engineering and their portable cellular voice-mail to some palm-top and
portable makers equiping their machines with slots.
Reality is that a 5meg PCMCIA is reasonable. So, the ballpark number is
3.65 hours continuous uncompressed ink. Lets assume compression, and
that probably hits 8 hours.
So, could one get back to the office and let the network pool
transcriber do the interpretation, off-loading the task?
jtr
