CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read Only Memory)
A compact disc format used to hold text, graphics and hi-fi stereo sound. It's like an audio CD with spiral, grooved tracks, but uses a different format for recording data. The audio CD player cannot play CD-ROMs, but CD-ROM players can play audio discs. CD-ROMs hold 650MB of data, which is equivalent to about 250,000 pages of text, or 20,000 medium-resolution images. Sometimes 680MB is used as the capacity, depending on whether the total number of bytes (681,984,000) is divided by 1,000,000 or 1,048,576. A CD-ROM drive (player, reader) connects to a controller card, which is plugged into one of the computer's expansion slots. Earlier drives used a proprietary interface and came with their own car
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