History (1989): Optotech Assets Sold to HP

There wasn’t much left from Optotech Inc. (Colorado Springs, CO) since it had sold its entire product line of WORM drives to Shugart in June 1988.

With ISI, created in 1984, Optotech had been a pioneer in WORM drives for 5.25-inch optical disks and also was one of the first to develop a jukebox for this type of media.

On its own side, Shugart has had a curious position concerning digital optical disks: it had sold its subsidiary Optimem to Cipher, which could have meant that it no longer wanted to invest in this matter, then, afterwards it acquired Optotech’s WORM activity to bury it.

This only left a few dozen people to keep on working on magneto-optical development, and it’s this same team who was acquired, with a series of patents, by Hewlett-Packard, for about $3 million to merge it with its laboratories in Greeley, CO. The buyer didn’t even keep the name of Optotech.

At the end, the big looser could be Sony, the sole magneto-optical drive supplier for Hewlett-Packard.

HP has developed its own jukebox for 5.25-inch rewritable disks.

Officially, today, Cherokee Data Systems, for special applications, Maxoptix (a joint-venture between Maxtor and Kubota) are the only US companies to fight the Japanese domination in rewritable optical disk drives.

This doesn’t mean that other American firms are not working on the subject. The first one is IBM, with a considerable delay compared with Ricoh and Sony, the obvious leaders on the market, far in front of Canon, Panasonic, Olympus, Sharp, Pioneer and Ocean (affiliated to Mountain and Nakamichi).

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠23, published on December 1989.