History (1988): Gigatape New Name in DATA-DAT

Gigatape New Name in DATA-DAT

Gigatape for Datensicherung GmbH (Puchheim, West Germany) is a young, internationally oriented company born in May 1987 with the sole objective to develop, product and market a streamer based on the Data-DAT (Data- Digital Audio Tape) technology.

It was set up by 4 people who are Peter Rosenbeck, chairman and CEO, Wolfgang Seidelmann, Harald Sonntag and Hans Joachim Steinmetz.

In October 1987, it bought back Hitecom Ltd. and announced the Giga 1200 prototype at CeBit. At the end of 1987, it called for capitalist ventures (Daimler-Benz, Fiat/Olivetti) to increase its financial needs.

A preserial production of Giga 1200 came out in February 1988 with an introduction at the CeBit’88 fair.

Mass production should begin in April 1988.

It’s an audio DAT by-product. The mechanism is manufactured by Gründig AG, at Förth, near Nüremberg.

Gigatape produced the data processing interfaces.

The Giga 1200 is a streamer with 1.2GB capacity, a maximum transfer rate in streaming mode of 192 KB/s and an average access time of 20s. The speed of the magnetic tape, read by a helical scan head at 2,000rpm, is 8.15mm/s. It is equipped with the Reed-Solomon error detection technique. It achieves an error rate under 10.¹⁵.

The magnetic cartridges, 73mm long and 54mm wide, ought to cost DM35 to DM40 for 15m, DM50 for 60m therefore 1.2GB.

The drive is announced at DM10,000, without the interface that will cost DM1,400 in SCSI, DM800 in QIC 02/36 and DM1,800 in ESDI or Pertec.

Beginning this year, Gigatape plans to manufacture 20,000 drives, then 180,000 in 1989 and 240,000 in 1990.

The unit presented on the booth was pretty large, but we were secretly shown a 5.25-inch form factor half-height drive for the same Data-DAT cartridge.

The next generation of Gigatape products might be an expansion of the current unit up to a multiple device with four connected single units. That machine could then save 4.8 Gbytes in the streamin mode without operator. Reflections are also going in the direction of host-releaving subsystems with robot mechanisms.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠2, volume ≠1, published on March 1988.