On Thursday 20 February 2003 10:27 am, Alan Cox wrote: > This assumes you don't mind having multiple bits on the wire at the same > time but different distances down it.
... The normal situation with high-speed fibre, or even copper, networks, by the way. A few years ago, I read of some experiments being done using a very long coil (thousands of metres) of fibre optic, with a continuous regeneration at the start/end point, to implement a form of volatile DASD. It was like a rotating disk drive with one very huge track, spinning at hundreds of thousands of RPM. By default, bits coming off the end were simply replicated in order back into the coil, but of course they could be changed at that point for update operations. I don't recall where I read this, or what ever became of the idea. If I recall, the intent was to create an extremely fast scratchpad storage medium at a relatively low cost. Scott -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott D. Courtney, Senior Engineer Sine Nomine Associates [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sinenomine.net/
