🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings.  I'm not sure this query is exactly appropriate for this list,
but here goes...

Our office has acquired some CD-ROM disks from the Census bureau. We're in the
market for an appropriate driver and have questions about what we will need to
run everything.  Our first problem is that our office is mostly Macs and IBM
PS-2's.  The compatibility problems with the Macs and these Census datafiles
(which are in D-Base format) are obvious, so I thought we should buy a CD drive
for one of the PS-2's and port extracts to the Macs from on floppy disks.
Unfortunately, our PS-2's have micro-channel busses.  This severly limits the
drives we can buy (our regular hardware dealer could only find one
micro-channel drive and it cost $500 more than the other drives we were looking
at).  I'm also concerned  with the memory requirements of the CD driver and
its subsystems.  Our PS-2's only have 1 MB of RAM, so we'll have to buy more
(over-priced, difficult to install, etc.) memory from IBM before getting the
system to work.

My questions are:  How much RAM is usually required in a PC/DOS machine to run
a CD-ROM drive?   Is it possible to read CD's written under a DOS system
on a Mac? (e.g.: FoxPro on the Mac will read PC D-Base files once they have
been copied to a Mac disk, would I be able to read the Census files using
FoxPro and a Mac CD-ROM drive?)  I'd appreciate any help, leads or suggestions
regarding this matter. I'll also post a summary of responses.

Many Thanks --Adam Bickford. Smithsonian Institution.
              SECEM111@SI.SIVM.EDU