History (1991): Optical Catching Up With Magnetic

The French manufacturer ATG (Toulouse, France) from the Optix group, unveiled it had developed a new technology that could drastically improve the characteristics of optical units and could make them comparable to the best magnetic drives.

This should upset the storage industry.

The weakness in optical drives is their access time that is never lower than 35ms in the best case.

“We have developed a new conventional optical head, that only weighs 2.5 grams, compared with 15 to 20 until now, which allows us too lower access time to 12ms,” said Alain Boutier, CEO.

At Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas, NE, the company will show in a room of the Sands Hotel the prototype of a 3.5-inch magneto-optical drive using this remarkable optical head. In addition, the removable optical disk’s capacity will be close to 250MB, 2x more than what is offered on the market. Another spec: a 10ms latency, which is nevertheless quite high, a 1MB/s transfer rate with media rotating at 1,800 rpm.

“These are low features, we can easily increase the drive’s capacity and rotation speed. We are not launching a product, it’s only a technological announcement,” adds Bouttier.

The media is supplied by PDO on a special format originated from ATG.

The initial idea came after the meeting of Denka or Denki Kagaku Kogyo KK (Tokyo, Japan), a petrochemical group that exists since 1915 with 4,100 employees, looking for a diversification but that already manufactured 3.5-inch Winchester disks and substrates, and Optical Disc, Inc., subsidiary of Brand Technologies (Chatsworth, CA). Denka financed the development, ODI made the mechanism and ATG will manufacture the optical and electronic parts.

The major handicap of this new unit is that it cannot read 3.5-inch magneto-optical disks in the 128MB ISO standard where IBM and a crowd of Japanese are involved. It would be a suicide to not guarantee a compatibility with actual media. The Franco-US-Japanese consortium should decide before the end of the year on the amount they will invest in further developments to settle his problem.

On another hand, Alain Bouttier said that its holding Optix had fixed as an aim to put ahead ATG’s technology, this means to market its know-how to Japanese or US companies under licence, subsystems sales or agreements on subsystem manufacturing.

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.