CD-ROM: a primer for physicians.

Compact disks with read-only memory (CD-ROM) are a powerful storage medium and are rapidly becoming standard equipment on personal computers. Each disk has the capacity to store 680 million bytes (megabytes or MB) of text, graphics, photographic images, audio, animation, and full-motion video. Many medical reference texts are currently available in CD-ROM format, with the advantage of improved search, retrieval, cross-referencing, and printing capabilities.