History (1995): Optical Tape Cartridge Rises From Ashes

Start-up Lots Technology (Santa Clara, CA) will develop a drive based on an IBM-3480 style cartridge containing 1TB of capacity on a single optical tape with a transfer rate in excess of 15MB/s.

William Oakley presides over the company.

The key to the technology is the development of a holographic element that splits a single laser beam in to 180 individually controllable beams that access concurrently an equal number of parallel tracks on the surface of the tape.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s an old idea that LaserTape Systems (Campbell, CA) once tried to realize. That firm went out of business in 1993.

Furthermore, Lots Technology acquired the LaserTape trademark, which it will use for the new drive.

At one point, StorageTek thought about integrating these WORM tapes and drives into its automated libraries.

Note also that the Canadian Creo Products developed a drive for reel-to-reel optical tape with the same capacity, 1TB. Creo was acquired by EMASS (Garland, TX), a subsidiary of E-Systems, in 1995.

Not only is WORM tape ill-regarded by the industry, but the manufacturer of the media, ICI Imagedata (Manningtree, Essex, UK), a business unit of UK chemical group ICI, announced at the beginning of June that it would stop all production in May 1998 (all orders which come after September 1, 1996 will not be honored).

The decision to discontinue came after the firm lost a fortune on this activity, which it launched in 1991. The few users of WORM optical tape who fell for the arguments about its long lifetime will be left in the lurch.

For its part, EMASS, which can scarcely sell a tape drive without tape, also ceased production of Creo drives.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 101, published on June 1996.