CD-ROM on XL-400?

[RWK@FUJI.ILA.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (Robert W. Kerns)]

    Date: Wed, 25 Jul 90 16:58 PDT
    From: Reti@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com (Kalman Reti)

	Date: Wed, 25 Jul 90 15:57:31 MDT
	From: drstrip@cs.sandia.gov (David R Strip [1411])

	Has anyone attached a CD-ROM to an XL-400? How do
	you do it? Drivers? Comments? Thanks
    How hard to do this depends upon what's on the CD rom and what
    you want to do with it.  Assuming the controller is SCSI (since
    that's the only one you can hardwarily connect to an XL400),
    there are routines for issuing SCSI commands from user code.
    Presumably the SCSI device has some other machine's file
    system on it (either DOS's or the MAC's I'd guess); 

Presumably what he wants here is to read the ISO High
Sierra format.  This is why CD-ROM's can be useful on both
MS-DOS and MAC systems; the format is not proprietary.

Of course, the software to meaningfully access the data
from the CD-ROM's files will probably be specific to a
small number of operating systems, but if the access
technology isn't too hairy (such as hairy compression
algorithms, or database formats), it shouldn't be much of a
problem writing code to retrieve the data from the files.