First off, everyone loves wax cylinders. Secondly, you always want to store more on your disc-based media than you actually can, at some point.

Enter cylindrical optical media. It's a plastic cylinder with the pits on the outside, analogous to the pits on the data side of a conventional CD (or DVD, or Blu-Ray, or whatever).

Advantages? Well, it would, of course, be awesomely cool. Tubular, in fact. Secondly, it would be harder to manufacture and subject to crushing, which will induce people to value their media that much more. And thirdly, the medium has as much storage capacity as you like.

If one inch was equivalent to a DVD (4.7 GB), and you had a terabyte to store, you could easily accomplish this with a seventeen-foot cylinder. Note that the cylinder drives would be open on both ends, so there would be no limit on the length of a cylinder.

I'll bet there's some advantage to the speed being constant (that is, the speed at which the media travels under the laser), where in disc-based media it's faster near the center.
-- partdavid, Aug 01 2007

Tubular http://www.urbandic...ne.php?term=tubular
[normzone, Aug 01 2007]

Why does the cylinder have to be rigid? It could be flexible like a hose so you could roll up your media.
-- Galbinus_Caeli, Aug 01 2007


Totally! But really, what can't be easily accomplished with a 17 foot cylinder? It would be nice if the reading device could read the cylinder while it was on the roof rack of your car.
-- bungston, Aug 01 2007


Terrible idea, excellently argued.
-- wagster, Aug 01 2007


I've thought before of a cylindrical 'disk'. I thought it wouldn't be worth it because it would waste so much more space than a stack of normal disks. (I just got an idea!!).
-- BJS, Aug 01 2007


Write the data on the inside of the tube, then it won't get scratched even if it's rolling around on the floor of your car. And you can have more 'artwork' on the outside.

Dixons will sell a 'CT care and cleaning kit' consisting of a dozen end-protecting caps, and a feather duster for up the middle, so to speak.

Easily hide records with explicit 'parental advisory' content in inconspicuous lengths of drainpipe.

What a lot of rubbish! I'll take one!
-- theNakedApiarist, Aug 02 2007


"What a lot of rubbish! I'll take one!" [Marked-for-tagline]
-- Galbinus_Caeli, Aug 03 2007



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