History (1992): Agreement Between 3M and Iomega

3M Corp. (Saint Paul, MN) has released its first 3.5-inch 21MB floptical diskettes, originally developed by Insite Peripherals (San Jose, CA).

Each one costs $31.45.

Maxell Corp. of Japan should price its own ones, available at the end of this year, at about $23.

On its side, Iomega Corp. (Roy, UT) has paid $2 million to Insite for a license to develop, manufacture and sell floptical media. The Utah firm has developed a proprietary laser system to manufacture disks that it will sell itself but that will also be offered to other companies.

At its subsidiary Bosco, Iomega has already been working for a while on a floptical drive for which it had acquired a license from Insite in 1989. Iomega plans to introduce later this year a unit using laser holography and voice-coil actuators.

Insite is actually the only source of drives, manufactured by MKE of Japan.

Iomega is going to have to increase the capacity of its Bernoulli drives to avoid overlapping floptical units. The plans are to reach 150MB with adrive that will be able to read and write the previous gen of 90MB media.

Iomega also schedules to offer new cartridges with capacities of 36, 65 or 105MB.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠57, published on October 1992.