History (1991): New Research Laboratory on Rewritable Optical Media at ATG

The only remaining French company involved in data processing media (not magnetic but optical), is ATG Gigadisc (Toulouse, France), who even after some problems is keeping on, bravely facing competitors, especially Japanese ones.

It still manufactures optical digital WORM disks, 12-inch wide, and their R/W drives.

Sony had just surpassed its 6.4GB Gigadisc 6000 and Hitachi has recently announced it will beat it with 7GB. But the French company already has up its sleeve a 9GB model.

Furthermore, it has just set up a laboratory to try to control new rewritable optical media that is going to have a much larger market. And to attain this goal, it choose two partners from Toulouse, in the South of France, the Paul-Sabatier University (via the Laboratoire de Chimie des matériaux inorganiques) and the CNRS (Laboratoire d’automatisme et d’analyse des systèmes). The project is financed by the Conseil Regional Midi-Pyrénées. The means, human (15 engineers/researchers) and technical are gathered in ATG’s offices for a 4-year initial period. The estimated budget is FF46 million.

The goal is to develop an optical technology that will be able to compete with standard magnetic products.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠36, published on January 1991.