Optical tape

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A piece of motion picture film showing two digital audio formats (blue: SDDS , gray: DD ) along with the analog audio format. Although not strictly an optical tape format, it is very similar to it.

The optical tape ( engl. Optical Tape ) is a medium for optical storage and is usually made of a long and narrow strip made of plastics, can be written to the pattern, and read again. It combines the technologies of cinema and optical storage media, but is not compatible with either of the two.

In the 1990s, it was planned to make the optical tape a general storage medium for computers with high capacity and fast data rates. At least one working system and several prototypes have been developed to date, but none of these technologies are widely used.

The motivation behind the development of this technology is the possibility to achieve much larger storage capacities than with magnetic tapes or optical storage disks.

The first commercial optical tape system was introduced by CREO Products in 1990 (12-inch, 35mm) with the gigantic capacity of 1 TB at the time. Today's systems have capacities of up to 100 TB . In the late 1990s, two NIST- funded industrial consortia for optical tape technology were formed:

• TRAAMS / DOTS (Polaroid / Kodak, Motorola, Xerox, ECD, Honeywell, SAIC, ...)
• DVOTR / LOTS (Polaroid, LOTS, Avid, EMC, Lucent)

credentials

1. ↑ 1991 New York Times article on optical tape technologies.
2. ^ Information about Creo from answers.com
3. ↑ AIIM Overview (PDF; 41 kB) of Optical tape technologies c. 1996.
4. ↑ comp.arch.storage summary of several optical tape technologies available c. 1997
5. ↑ Applications of Optical Tape in the Entertainment Industry (PPT; 810 kB) ( Memento of the original from July 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Technical explanation ( Memento of the original from May 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of Laser Optical Tape Storage technology (LOTS). 
7. ↑ LOTS status report ( memento of the original from September 29, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.