2001 Updates

Download/Site Licence: After an absence of a couple of months a Download version of the site is again available, together with new Site Licence options aimed at educational establishments, as distinct from commercial organisations;

Hard Disks: Section on "AV capability" added to cover the particular performance characteristics required by audio-visual applications and how this relates to the issue of hard disk recalibration and section on "The 8.4GB limit" renamed "Capacity barriers" and expanded to cover the three principal IDE/ATA disk capacity restrictions that have arisen since the mid-1980s;

CD-R/CD-RW: Sections added on "Mini media" - the 8cm CD format that's gaining favour as a removable storage solution in digital consumer devices and "Digital audio media" - the special CD recordable/rewritable media for use with consumer CD recorders that incorporates the SCMS copy protection scheme;

Scanners: General update, including reorganisation and expansion of information relating to "Scan resolution" and the addition of an explanatory graphic to section on "PMT";

Digital Cameras: Sections on "Memory storage" and "Disk storage" updated to reflect the current maximum capacities of CompactFlash and SmartMedia memory cards, IBM's second-generation Microdrive devices and Sony's support of CD-RW media as a removable storage option;

Product Reviews: Periodic overhaul to add links for the latest hardware and to purge dead links continued with the "DVD-ROM Drives" and "MP3 Players" product categories being dealt with in this update.

New Design: Phase 2 of the site's redesign implemented, introducing a database driven Glossary which provides flexible Word Lookup functionality in addition to the previous Guide-to-Glossary linkage and categorised Glossary-to-Guide navigation capability;

System Memory: Section on "RIMMs" updated and expanded, including the addition of an image depicting the major elements of a Rambus memory subsystem;

CD-R/CD-RW: Section added for Sony's "Double density media" standard, which doubles the capacity of its writable/rewritable DD-R/DD-RW discs to 1.3GB and which reached the market in mid-2001 and section on "BURN-Proof technology" expanded to identify other manufacturers' similar technologies;

Removable Storage: "Floppy disk" section expanded to better cover the technology's gradual evolution to today's 3.5in form factor and section on "Super-floppies" updated in light of Matsushita's new technology which increases the capacity of a standard high density floppy disk from 1.44MB to an incredible 32MB!;

Input Devices: Section on "Mice" expanded to cover the emergence of the wireless optical mouse and "Touchscreens" section expanded to cover devices based on infrared technology;

Product Reviews: Periodic overhaul to add links for the latest hardware and to purge dead links commenced this month, with the following product categories being dealt with in this update:

"CD-Rewritable Drives", "DVD/CD-RW Combo Drives", "DVD-Rewritable Drives" (a combination of the previous "DVD-RAM" and "DVD-Recordable" categories), "19in Monitors", "21in Monitors" and "Panel Displays".

New Design: Site given a (long overdue!) facelift. The new design gives the site a more modern appearance and menu system, whilst retaining the original design's ease of use, unit of content delivery and page naming convention. The result is a navigation system that allows any page to be accessed by no more than two mouse clicks!

Phase 2 of the redesign - scheduled for implementation on 1Nov01 - will introduce a database driven Glossary, offering significantly more functionality and flexibility than the current system.

CD/Download: A consequence of some of the new technology underlying the new design is that the offline CD and Download versions of the site are no longer available.

Feedback: Your feedback on the new design is important - especially in its early days since it's inevitable that its implementation will have introduced some bugs. Please report any problems you experience - and any other comments you wish to make - via the "Site Feedback" forum which can be reached by clicking here.

DVD: Section on DVD+RW updated to reflect the announcement of the first such drive, slated for availability in the USA in the autumn of 2001;

Input Devices: Input Devices: Section added on "Touchscreens".

If the update this month appears a little on the light side, fear not, a great deal of time is currently being devoted to a complete redesign of the site, which is scheduled for implementation on 1Oct01.

System Memory: Section added on "1T-SRAM", a memory technology that has the speed and low power consumption advantages of SRAM, coupled with the high density and low cost advantages of DRAM;

Serial Comms: Updated in light of the recently introduced V.44 and V.92 analogue modem standards;

Mobile Communications: New page added, outlining the principal mobile communications technologies, from the early analogue 1G systems to the future digital 3G systems. Accessed via the "Communications" navigation level page and organised into the following sections: GSM, GPRS, 3G, WAP, Bluetooth and GPS, the new page contains some information previously located in the series of "Mobile Computing" pages;

Hard Disks: Section added on "Pixie Dust", an IBM innovation that promises to increase the area density of hard disk drive platters.

Motherboards: Section on "BIOS" updated to reflect some of the new features provided by modern systems and new sections added on "FlexATX" - Intel's evolution of it's microATX form factor - and "Riser architectures" - covering the recent emergence of new approaches designed to both reduce overall system costs and increase the flexibility of the system manufacturing process and focusing, in particular, on the CNR and ACR specifications;

System Memory: Section added on "Presence detect" - the means by which memory chips are identified to the memory controller logic - and section on "Memory upgrades" expanded to provide further guidance on memory identification;

Mobile Computing: Section on "GPS" updated to reflect the Presidential order which resulted in the civilian service being raised to the same level of accuracy as had been available to the military for years;

CD-ROM: "Manufacturing" section added, outlining the various stages in the CD-ROM production cycle from premastering to replication;

Graphics Cards: Section on "Direct3D" updated in respect of the latest version of Microsoft's suite of multimedia APIs, DirectX 8.0;

Sound Cards: Sections added on "Connectivity" - to address the improvements as a result of the introduction and subsequent development of Creative Technologies innovative "breakout" drive bay panel concept - and on "A3D" and "EAX" - two extensions to Microsoft's DirectSound3D (DS3D) standard which have gained widespread support from games' developers.

CD-ROM: Section added on "File systems";

DVD: Major update and reorganisation. In particular to sections on "DVD-R" - updated to cover the format's division into "authoring" and "general" formats, "DVD-RW" - significantly expanded in light of the format's emergence as the second rewritable format to come to market and "DVD+RW - the much-delayed for which products are now promised before the end of 2001;

Panel Displays: New sections added - "In-Plane Switching", "Vertical Alignment" and "Multi-Domain Vertical Alignment" - to describe the evolutionary developments in TFT technology and expansion of section on "ALiS" - Fujitsu's high-resolution PDP technology;

Networking: Expanded description of the two "IEEE 802.11" spread-spectrum techniques - Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS).

Product Reviews: New pages added for "Socket A Motherboards" and "Pentium 4 Motherboards" and the major overhaul to add links for latest hardware and to purge dead links completed, with the following product categories being dealt with in this update:
"Socket 370 Motherboards", "Slot 1 Motherboards", "Slot A Motherboards", "Super7 Motherboards", "EIDE Hard Disk Drives", "SCSI Hard Disk Drives" and "Sound Cards".

Product Reviews: Major overhaul to add links for latest hardware and to purge dead links continued with the following product categories being dealt with in this update:
"Graphics Cards", "19in Monitors", "21in Monitors", "Panel Displays", "Flatbed Scanners", "External V.90 modems" and "Internal V.90 modems".

Product Reviews: Major overhaul to add links for latest hardware and to purge dead links. Links to older reviews relegated to supplementary "Archives" pages for several product categories. New pages added for "DVD-Recordable Drives" and "DVD/CD-RW Combo Drives". Product categories dealt with in this update are as follows:
"CD-Rewritable Drives", "DVD-ROM Drives", "DVD-RAM Drives", "MP3 Players", "Personal Laser Printers", "Colour Laser Printers", "Inkjet Printers", "Multifunction Devices" and "Digital Cameras".

Communications: New navigation level page introduced, allowing access to "Serial Comms", "Digital Comms" and "Networking" pages;

Networking: Completely new pages providing overviews of networking technology in general - including sections on the "OSI Model", "Topologies", "FDDI", "Token Ring" and "Ethernet" - and of the various solutions devised to support home networking - Phoneline, Powerline and Wireless - in particular.

Processors: Section on "Pentium 4" expanded to provide more detail on the NetBurst architecture's Hyper Pipelined Technology;

System Memory: Sections added on "Flash memory" and the a radical new memory technology with the potential to be its successor in a few years time, "Magnetic RAM";

Mobile Computing: Addition of "Expansion interfaces" section, identifying the various means by which PDAs may be connected to peripheral devices, additional memory modules and networks;

DVD: General update, including to the various copy protection schemes identified in the section on "Encryption" and to the tabulation of the various DVD region codes in the "Regional coding" section;

Removable Storage: Section on "Fluorescent disc technology" expanded and updated to reflect C3D's current product release plans;

Digital Cameras: Section on "CMOS" expanded to cover a breakthrough in image sensor technology which looks set to enable CMOS to rival CCD technology in terms of both quality and price and section on "Memory storage" updated to reflect current flash memory storage capacities.

Hard Disks: Wide-ranging update and expansion - with information being reorganised into three pages - including:
- Addition of sections on "Capacity" and "MR technology" to chronicle the progression in disk read/write head technology and associated areal densities from TFI through to GMR;
- Section on "Ultra DMA" renamed "Ultra ATA" and broadened to cover all generations of the Parallel ATA specification since its introduction in 1981;
- Section on RAID expanded to better explain its relationship with EDAP (Extended Data Availability and Protection);
- Section on "SMART" expanded to identify some of the types of failure condition the technology attempts to predict.

Digital Video: Section added on the "DivX" codec, the video compression technology which is promising to do for movies what MP3 has done for digital music.