Status of international optical disk standards

The authors wish to dedicate this paper to the late Mr. Patrick Sandell, the past Chairman of B11, whose stewardship of the optical disk standards activities in the past years produced much of the fruit which we will all enjoy. His leadership and contribution will be remembered for yeats to come. Optical technology for data storage offers media removability with unsurpressed reliability. As the media are removable, data interchange between the media and drives from different sources is a major concern. The optical recording community realized, at the inception of this new storage technology development,that international standards for all optical recording disk/cartridge must be established to insure the healthy growth of this industry and for the benefit of the users. Many standards organizations took up the challenge and numerous international standards were established which are now being used world-wide. This paper provides a brief summary of the current status of the international optical disk standards.