C Itoh has released a commercial version of an add-on 5.25 optical disk drive, the OPAC11-51, for DEC VAX machines: claimed to have access and data rates comparable with those of magnetic disks, it will be marketed jointly with Advanced Systems of Tokyo, and is a successor to the 12 series of drives released by both companies 18 months ago; the two-sided capacity is 600Mb, it has Q-Bus and Unibus controllers, and the desk-top version is $20,500, the rack-mount version is $20,200 and an auto-chaner for the drive will be available early next year.
