Sintrom Electronics is to distribute VAST, a tape backup product for Personal Computers from Emerald Systems Corp in San Diego, California that can hold up to 2.2Gb; based on helical scan technology found in video cassette machines, VAST has a data transfer rate of 256Kbits-per-second and can backup 15Mb per minute; Emerald’s product manager Winn Schwartau says the product, which was launched six weeks ago in the US, has already sold out this year’s production in the US; it is aimed at networks, financial data archiving, publishing, image scanning and general large capacity data distribution and costs UKP5,800 in the UK with the cassettes – 8mm fine metal particle media developed by Sony Corp – costing UKP35 – 1.6 pence a Megabyte.
