Overview

In a double-speed CD-ROM, the pits go flying by the focused spot at a rate of 1,200,000 pits per second. As they do, the servo system adjusts the tracking and the focus of the laser beam so that it remains within about 0.1 ?m of the track center and within about 2 ?m of the correct focus position even though the CD-ROM disc may be wobbling from side-to-side by 70 ?m (44 track diameters) and up-and-down by 600 ?m as it rotates. The performance of this opto-electronic system is truly remarkable.

Murray Sargent III and Richard L. Shoemaker
The Personal Computer from the Inside Out

The companion CD-ROM contains all the source code and executable images mentioned in the book, including several ports of the Quantum Framework (QF). The disc also includes answers to the exercises scattered throughout the book, the Evaluation Version of On Time RTOS-32 v4.0, Visio stencils used to create the diagrams in this book, and several references in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). ^[1]

The CD-ROM is designed for maximum usefulness, even without installing any of it on your hard drive. In particular, you can browse the source code, execute examples, and read PDF documents directly from the CD.

The disc comes with an HTML-based index page, index.htm, in its root directory (Figure C.1). It is automatically activated if the CD autoinsert notification is enabled on your system. You need a Web browser (e.g., Microsoft Internet Explorer...