OnStream

» see onstream.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Digital Compact Cassette was Philips losing an argument in public. It arrived in 1992 as the digital tape that would still play your old analog cassettes. It lost to Sony's MiniDisc and then to the recordable CD, and by 1996 it was gone. What Philips still had afterward was a very good set of tape heads and the people who knew how to make them. In 1998 it put them into a separate company called OnStream and told it to sell backups.

The technology was renamed Advanced Digital Recording, and the pitch was price. A 15 GB internal IDE drive cost $299 at retail and the cartridges, made by Verbatim, were $40 for 15 GB, at a time when that much storage was a serious amount of a hard disk. The tape was 8 mm wide with 192 tracks and the SCSI version moved about 2 MB a second. Every drive came bundled with a backup program called Echo. The company ran on two sites, Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where Philips also sits, and Longmont, Colorado, in the same building as Adaptec.

Bill Beierwaltes was chairman and chief executive, which gave the venture real credibility in the storage trade: he had founded Colorado Memory Systems and sold it to Hewlett-Packard in 1992. Philips kept significant equity, GE Capital and Charterhouse Group put money in, and the staff came out of the same world, with executives hired away from Philips and from Iomega. By the end of 1998 OnStream had 350 employees and 47 patents, raised $50 million that year, and raised $75 million the next.

A third round never came. The drives were cheap and good and the market for cheap tape was the part of the tape market that was dying fastest, as hard disks got large enough that most people stopped buying a second device to copy things onto. IDC put OnStream at 1.1 percent of the worldwide tape business for 2002, on $20.3 million of revenue. On 28 April 2003 OnStream Data was granted bankruptcy protection in the Netherlands and its American subsidiary in San Diego went down with it, which left exactly six tape drive makers in the world.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cartridge that stuck out of the drive ~

There was one lovely piece of industrial stubbornness in the product. On the SCSI model you could use a larger cartridge holding 1,500 meters of tape, enough for 25 GB with no compression at all, and it did not fit inside the drive. It went in and stayed partly outside, sticking out of the front of the machine like a cassette left half ejected. Searching that much tape from one end to the other took about sixteen minutes.

~ two bankruptcies ~

The first one came on 16 March 2001, when the American arm filed Chapter 7 and the Longmont offices closed. Accounts of the damage differ: the contemporaneous report counted about 80 people let go, while the 2003 retrospective puts it at 160 of the company's 400. What came out the other side was two businesses. OnStream Data kept making drives in the Netherlands with a smaller US operation, and OnStream MST kept the part that was arguably more valuable, the thin film tape heads, along with microsieves and tiny mechanical switches.

The diagnosis in the trade press after the second failure was not about the technology at all. OnStream was the smallest of the remaining manufacturers and it had put itself in the segment of the market that was shrinking hardest. It had also never landed a major OEM, which in the tape industry means nobody else's name was ever on the box. A storage format sold only by the company that invented it is a format with one point of failure, and when that company stopped, every ADR cartridge in a drawer became a thing you needed a dead manufacturer's hardware to read.

~ what happened to the heads ~

The tape head division had the strangest afterlife in this file. OnStream MST was reborn in 2003 as fluXXion, which used the same micro-engineering to make high-precision filters, and found customers filtering beer and other food products. It went bankrupt in 2011. So a music format became a backup format, and the machinery that made the backup format ended up clarifying lager.

Home backup in Turkey over those same years meant a spindle of blank CD-Rs, and before that it meant not bothering. A $299 drive plus $40 cartridges was an office purchase here. Most households simply did not think about backups at all. onstream.com belongs to a British metering company now, which has no connection to any of this and bought a short domain that had come free.

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