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Home→The Westburn Dictionary of Marketing→O→optical disc

optical disc

Definition:
A five-inch plastic disc containing digital data. It is composed of thousands of concentric circles, each containing microscopic pits that are read by a laser. The information is passed to the computer CPU and transferred to ASCII format for manipulation by the appropriate system. Currently data may only be read from the disc and not written to it, though the technology to write to it interactively is being developed. Current storage capacity is 540 megabytes or the equivalent of 1500 floppy discs (or to a pile of A4 paper the height of an eight-storey building!), though the rate of technological change will probably have rendered that figure obsolete by the time you read this.

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© Westburn Publishers Ltd 2002, The Westburn Dictionary of Marketing edited by Michael J Baker, ISBN 978-0-946433-01-8. www.themarketingdictionary.com. Entry: [Kenneth R. Deans], [1998].