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MDI OSTA Involvement
MDI’s involvement in promoting file system standards began in October 1991 with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). A committee was formed whose primary objective was to develop a standard file system for write-once and rewritable optical disk. From 1991 to 1994, MDI played an active role in the leadership of the committee with an officer of the company acting as Vice-Chairman. After many months of work, the committee yielded a draft, known as NSR, for non-sequential recording.
During the NSR development process, the committee invited participation from the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) standards group in Europe. Resulting from ECMA involvement in the standard, it was determined that the most favorable path to defining a universally accepted standard was to first define an ECMA standard. Thus, at a meeting in June 1992, the ECMA voted on and approved the finalized NSR draft document as the ECMA 167 standard.
ECMA 167 was submitted to the International Standard Organization (ISO) Fast Track in 1993. ISO Fast Track takes an existing National Standard and submits it to a 6-month review and vote process. During this review process the voting member countries of ISO review the document to determine if it should become an ISO standard. On November 8, 1993 in Sarasota, Florida the ISO software group met to review the results of the Fast Track vote and determined the final content of the ISO 13346 standard. MDI headed the U.S. delegation at this meeting.
The U.S. delegation proposed a list of technical changes to ECMA 167 before becoming an ISO standard. The technical changes were meant to resolve deficiencies discovered in the NSR draft by MDI's research and development in an early implementation of the file system. As a result of these changes and others, minor modifications were made to the NSR draft, and the ISO 13346 standard was approved. Later, the ECMA republished its standard to make it identical to ISO 13346.
MDI discovered that ISO 13346 was a complex standard and maintained that a set of guidelines should be written if there were to be true data interchange among various implementations. In the fall of 1993, MDI submitted a draft document to the newly formed OSTA Technical Committee that addressed how to implement ISO 13346 for DOS, OS/2, and UNIX. This draft document is what evolved into today’s Universal Disk Format (UDF) standard.
You can find out more about MDI's UDF file system in our UDF White Paper available here (PDF - 110K).
In its ongoing efforts to ensure compatibility between various UDF implementations, the OSTA holds ongoing meetings where UDF software developers gather to exchange and test each other’s products. Known as UDF Plugfests, the events enable developers to learn how their products interact with other products in the marketplace, document any incompatibilities and work together to resolve them.
MDI is one of the leading software developers attending UDF Plugfests. Other participating companies include Adaptec, Aplix, Apple, Asimware, B.H.A., Hitachi, IBM, JPL, K-Par, Matsushita, Microsoft, Open Interface, Philips, Ricoh, Smart Storage, Software Architects, Sun Microsystems, Tracer, U.S. Design, and Veritas. The types of media exchanged include CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, MO, and hard disks across platforms such as Windows 98, Windows NT, Macintosh OS, IBM workstations, and Sun workstations.
MDI successfully tests media interchange with Plugfest participants and continues to take part in ongoing OSTA events. That means you can be sure that our UDF file system is compatible with the UDF products built by every software developer participating in Plugfest.
If you would like more information about the OSTA, you may visit the organization's website at www.osta.org.
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