DEC intends to use 4mm Digital Audio Tape technolgy using the Digital Data Storage format to provide a cost effective, unattended back-up for workstations, file servers and small multi-user systems: DEC believes that the DDS format, already used by the likes of Wang and Hewlett-Packard, will become an ANSI standard media interchange for non-networked systems offering many benefits over alternative tape technologies as it offers 1.3Gb of capacity on each tape; DEC expectsto offer drives using the formant in the summer; no official prices were given but drives are expected to cost in the region of $5,000.
