Researchers at Alexa Internet estimate that the whole internet consisted last summer of three trillion bytes of information, about the total capacity of 5,000 CD-roms - which is compact enough to be accommodated on a single state-of-the-art server computer.
Polish customs officials were a big worry for business until 2004, when open borders with the EU sidelined them overnight.Other efforts are less confidence-inspiring. Bulgaria's public-administration minister, Nikolai Vassilev, has sent 20,000 CD-ROMs with "self-study" anti-corruption software to local officials.
Why were software companies flogging cumbersome products in the form of CD-ROMs rather than as flexible services over the internet?
Two years ago, excitement about the Internet and the arrival of multimedia CD-ROMs helped persuade consumers to upgrade their PCs, using Intel's Pentium chip.
Nobody expected the marchers to be so numerous (Barcelona's La Vanguardia, a daily, sells "I was there" photo CD-ROMs).
Only in works of reference atlases, dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias and the like do CD-ROMs now seem to represent a serious challenge to the predominance of books.
But establishing the brand among picky Asian customers has been harder than expected.A second project for Rosetta Stone is to move customers away from buying boxes of CD-ROMs.
He also struck a deal with Time Warner, a giant media group, that is expected to bring the King estate around $10m a year: the company will produce new CD-ROMs and suchlike about King's life and works.Martin Luther King III, for his part, is not inclined to make the Christian Leadership so commercial.
In 2008 Hervé Falciani walked out of the Geneva branch of HSBC where he'd worked for three years, clutching five CD-Roms containing data on tens of thousands of account holders.
Founded in 1997, MediaTek began with controllers for CD-ROMs.
