History (1989): Joint-Venture Between Kodak and Olivetti for Optical Discs

The Italian company Olivetti and the US one Eastman Kodak agreed on sharing their know-how in optical technology for PC computers.

Effectively it means that Kodak is going to enter into Laserdrive Ltd. (Santa Clara, CA), a company controlled until now by Olivetti.

Each partner holds 40.17% of Laserdrive, the rest of the capital is shared by the company’s employees and investors.

Laserdrive was already producing a drive for WORM discs, the Laserdrive OD-810, sold by Olivetti.

The agreement plans that the two companies will jointly produce and market 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch optical disc drives for PCs.

Virtually, for the time being, Laserdrive will manufacture 3.5-inch erasable optical disc drives based on magneto-optical technology from Verbatim, a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak, who will supply the media.

On its small electronic document storage system, the OD-1000, Kodak used until now a 5.25-inch WORM disc drive originated from LSI, the 525WC, with 500 to 600MB per side.

On the other hand, for 6800 mass storage devices, Kodak manufactures 14-inch optical WORM discs.

Olivetti is part of Filenet’s capital, a large supplier of electronic document management systems and a manufacturer of 12-inch optical WORM disc juke-boxes.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠15, published on April 1989.