300 Movies Fit on Half-Inch Roll, Cost ‘Trivial’ : The Latest in Computer Storage? Paper

LONDON —  Don’t throw away your floppy disks yet, but a giant British company has just introduced a “paper for computers” that could store 300 full-length movies on a standard roll of half-inch tape.

“We call it Digital Paper,” said Michael Strelitz, marketing manager of ICI Electronics, in an interview. “We envisage it being used the way we use ordinary paper every day.

“With ordinary paper, you write on it and that’s that. You can rub out what you’ve written, but most of us don’t bother to do that. We just throw away the paper and use the next sheet.”

Digital Paper can be used the same way, Strelitz said, because it is so cheap.

“It is the lowest cost recording medium in the world,” he said.

Cost Is Trivial

Even using current optical storage technology, Digital Paper “could work out at less than one-third of a penny, or one-half of an American cent, per megabyte of stored data,” a company statement said.

“What this means,” Strelitz said, “is that you don’t have to bother about the cost of storing data any more, because it’s trivial.”

Digital Paper is a flexible plastic film coated with an infrared-sensitive dye which in turn is enveloped in a protective coating. Laser beams burn digital data into the dye layer, and another laser is used to read the stored data.

This type of optical data storage, as opposed to magnetic storage like that on a music cassette tape, was developed as computers become more and more powerful and required more and more stored data. The main optical storage device used now is an optical disc.

“But they’re rigid and bulky, more like a clay tablet,” Strelitz said.

“Ours is a flexible digital medium, like a paper for computers. It’s permanent, very high-performance, highly efficient in volumetric terms--you can store lots more data in much less space--and it’s substantially lower in cost.”

Cheaper Than Ordinary Paper

In fact, ICI officials claim that Digital Paper is cheaper than ordinary paper and up to 10 times cheaper than magnetic tape.

Strelitz announced the “new medium” at a recent London conference on optical memory applications. But ICI Electronics, a 5-year-old offshoot of giant Imperial Chemical Industries PLC, has been working to develop it for 2 1/2 years, he said.

For now, Digital Paper is a read-only medium. Information written on it cannot be changed or erased.

Current optical-storage lasers use infrared wavelengths. If a laser could be developed using the blue-green part of the visible spectrum, storage density could be at least doubled.

ICI and other scientists are working on both these problems, a company statement indicated. As it is, it said, a reel of Digital Paper half an inch wide and 2,400 feet long can store 600 gigabytes--the equivalent of 1,000 compact discs or 300 movies. This reel is the same size as a conventional 10 1/2-inch tape reel.

Strelitz said Digital Paper could be used in sheets, put into cassettes, cut up like cookies to make discs, coated onto cylinders, or cut into strips or tags.

“We have something unique that people will feel free to use, like paper, without thinking much about its cost,” he said.

A new Canadian company called Creo, outside Vancouver, is developing an optical drive with a Gargantuan appetite for data--useful for satellite mapping of Earth resources, storing scientific data or providing “auditor trails” which automatically record all activity in large computer systems as a security measure.

Joint Patents Planned

Creo’s storage device will preserve 1 terabyte--1,000 billion bytes--on a Digital Paper tape half a kilometer long by 35 millimeters wide.

Strelitz said ICI Electronics also is working with the U.S. company Iomega, of Roy, Utah, which makes removable floppy disks which are protected by rigid cartridges. He said they would soon file joint patents for an optical storage system with major advantages in speed, capacity and cost.

Many other uses of Digital Paper are being developed, Strelitz said, “but those are the only two we’re prepared to discuss.”

He refused to put a money figure on Digital Paper’s potential market size. But he added:

“ICI can’t go into small markets. We expect this will have some significant impact on ICI, and ICI is a multibillion-dollar company.”