Photo mem

Foto-Mem Inc. was an American company that constructed optical storage media in the late 1960s .

The company was founded in 1967 with the aim of building mass storage devices for computers which, in contrast to the methods commonly used then (and now), do not store data magnetically on drums , tapes or disks , but on optical media .

For this purpose, the data should be saved on microfiche- like film cards and read out again with a laser . The Foto-Mem company hoped to achieve significantly higher writing densities than the magnet systems customary in the 1960s. The approximately cabinet-sized FM 390 system was advertised with the slogan "Multi Billion Bit Capacity" (German: many billion bits of capacity), which would have been equivalent to at least 120 megabytes , a gigantic amount of data by the standards of the time. By interconnecting several FM 390s, capacities in the gigabyte range would have been possible.

The structure of the device provided that the films containing the desired information would be automatically selected from cassettes with microfilms and these would then be scanned with a laser . The reliable selection of a certain film turned out to be mechanically problematic; the system called RISAR required for this was supposed to separate the films by air flow; Although this technology was not new at the time and was also used by other companies in the microfilm sector, the Foto-Mem system never worked reliably.

Furthermore, the adjustment of the reading laser was very difficult and had to be carried out by hand and regularly at short intervals. The laser was a very new technology when the Foto-Mem devices were developed; the first laser had only been built 7 years earlier.

In the early 1970s, Foto-Mem managed to sell one of its FM 390 systems to the New York Times , which wanted to use it to archive content from old issues . At that time, however, Foto-Mem had no more than a prototype that required manual intervention in normal operation. Despite intensive efforts for months, Foto-Mem did not succeed in putting the device installed at the New York Times into permanent operation.

Eventually, Foto-Mem ran out of money and the company had to file for bankruptcy in 1973 without ever installing a fully functioning device.

In the aftermath, there were lawsuits because investors accused the company founders of fraud: The main issue was that the issue prospectus contained the claim that the company had a working prototype and was at the start of production, although apparently Parts of the process had not yet been technically resolved.

Although the company's products were a failure, they basically anticipate the principles of today's optical media such as the CD , CD or DVD-ROM changers ( jukebox ) are today's equivalent of the concept of that time.

Web links

FM 390 Series in the Computer History Museum with illustration (visited on October 2, 2008, English)