History (1991): Dypy, New QIC Cartridge Manufacturer

Dypy (Melun, France) began manufacturing data cartridges for quarter-inch QIC-600 tapes.

Production began September 1 and should reach a monthly 10,000 output at the end of October then 50,000 per month per year.

Unit price per cartridge for a distributor ranges from FF70 for 60MB to FF150 for 52MB.

The company was founded 3 years ago by former people from RPS to manufacture 14-inch disk-packs that the Rhône-Poulenc subsidiary did no longer want to produce.

The disk-pack market had considerably sunk but Dipy, that employs 20 people, reported nevertheless FF15 million sales in its last FY, especially on account of Eastern Europe that buys 30% of its disk-pack production.

To diversify its activities, the small French company has began designing a new QIC-600 cartridge with the financial help of close to FF1.3 million from ANVAR, a French organization that helps the development of innovations.

R&D consisted in the work of 4 persons for 2 years and the investment in the production equipment was close to FF6 million.

RPS (Noisy-le-Grand, France) financed part of it in exchange of a share in the production that will be sold by the new subsidiary of Boeder AG (Flosheim am Main, Germany). Some funds came from a new shareholder, the Innolion company.

“We are really the only European manufacturers of QIC cartridges,” says Alec Clement, director of sales. “There is only one other plant in Europe, the US 3M one in Germany. The only other manufacturers in the world are Carlisle, Gigatek and Sony under 3M’s licence. All the others just put tags on products they don’t manufacture.”

Dypy, in the QIC Committee, didn’t acquire 3M’s licence but uses a different cartridge structure originated from Schlumberger. It uses an original belt associated to a pressing roller to obtain more rapidly a tape tension. The original concept allows to ventilate the interior part of the cartridge. In extreme warehousing conditions, the pressing roller, which eliminates the film of air between the turns, acts as to conserve the quality of the original winding.

Patent pending mechanical assembly permits to compensate differential expansion.

The French firm guarantees its data cartridges for 10,000 passes in normal use.

According to Dypy, the cost of the tape, bought from Maxell of Japan, counts for one fifth of the total cost of the cartridge.

“In 4 or 5 months, we also will start manufacturing DC-2000 minicartridges,” announced Clement.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠45, published on October 1991.