History (1988): Exabyte Shipped 12,000 8mm Tape Cartridge Subsystems

Exabyte Corp. (Boulder, CO) is a private company set up in 1985 notably by Juan A. Rodriguez, its chairman who was before with IBM, then 16 years with STC where he ended at the head of optical division, a company that hired up to 450 employees and developed a drive for a WORM 14-inch 4GB digital optical disk, no more manufactured.

Company’s main shareholders are the employees (25%), several venture capital companies like Hill, Kirby and Washing (20%), Institutional Venture Partners (20%), Master Fund (13%) and Centennial Fund (5%). Kubota, a Japanese firm shares 8% of Exabyte after an agreement between the two companies in July 1987.

This firm’s first idea was to develop a backup system based on Sony’s 8mm video technology.

According to its chairman, its firm is supposed to have made $9 million sales in last quarter ended September 1988 and plans $30 million for the entire year with a profit balance.

The company has shipped 12,000 8mm cartridge tape subsystems.

Exabyte’s only product for the moment is the EXB-8200, an 8mm cartridge tape subsystem with helical scan technology in a 5.25-inch form factor, the formatted capacity ranges from 256 to 2,332MB depending on the length of the tape (45 to 360 feet).

The drive for mid-range and microcomputers costs $2,225 in OEM quantities 1,000.

The company uses a video base supplied by Sony (Japan) and sub-assembly and card test from Solectron (USA).

All the electronic parts (controller, formatter, interface) are originated from Exabyte, and a special effort has been made on the validity of the information with a double control by a read after write checking and an original two dimension ECC.

Exabyte had shipped 1,200 of these units at the end of September 1988.

It owns 4 licensees among which are Kubota (Japan) and Wangtek/Rexon (USA).

Emerald (USA) is one of its main US resellers for backup on LAN.

Exabyte (with 160 people) assembles the drive in Boulder on an approximately 50,000 square feet plant.

Kubota is a second source manufacturer that actually produces about half of the drives and sells them in Japan through its subsidiary Nippon System House.

In the US, Exabyte owns sales offices in San Jose, Houston, Or1ando, Boston, Chicago and Orange County.

In Europe, it has sole distributors in every country, like OSSI (Meudon-la-Forêt) in France which sold 450 units at the end of September and plans to reach 700 before the end of the year. Its biggest customer is CERN (Centre Européen de Recherches Nucléaires) who has 15 drives in Switzerland for
data acquisition and backing up.

France is number two, right after England, and in front of West Germany who installed a little over 200 units.

With Sony’s help, Exabyte is trying to come to a standard for the 8mm cartridge in front of the ANSI. A meeting of the international ISO organization concerning this matter is scheduled for May 1989.

This didn’t stop the Colorado firm to declare its ambition to support the new 4mm Data-DAT format from Hewlett-Packard and Sony.

Exabyte’s main preoccupation is probably being the only one with its partner Kobuta to promote 8mm format in a backup industry where users usually prefer widespread supports for security and interchangeability reasons.

To this difficulty Juan A. Rodriguez answers twice: “When you’re alone, you can be lonely, or you can be happy.” “Interchangeability depends on the number of users and not on the number of manufacturers.”

The next products to come from Exabyte are an automatic library for a maximum of 240 cartridges that will be shown at next Comdex and a new drive, the EXB-8350 with a 3.5GB capacity.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠9, volume ≠1, published on October 1988.