History (1988): First Available Magneto-Optical Disks

During 10th Comdex on November 14-18 in Las Vegas, NV, Sony Corporation of America (Park Ridge, NJ) and Advanced Graphic Applications Inc. (New York, NY) announced that they are the first ones to offer magneto-optical drives.

Canon, Ricoh, and Maxtor should follow in a few months.

They all chose the 5.25-inch form factor with capacities ranging from 256MB on one side and up to 650MB on two sides.

While waiting for Seiko Epson, Verbatim is the only one to offer 3.5-inch form factor with a 60MB disk and an average 30ms seek time.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠11, volume ≠1, published on November 1988.