Optical disk technology and information.

The optical video disk, spawned by the home entertainment industry, and its counterpart, the optical digital disk, both hold great promise for information storage and retrieval and the scientific enterprise. Optical digital disks for computer mass storage are currently under development by many firms. In addition, efforts are under way to allow encoding of digital information on video disks. This is desirable as an inexpensive publication medium for machine-readable data as well as a means of obtaining both video and digital information on one disk. Potential applications of this technology include inexpensive on-line storage, random access graphics to complement on-line information systems, hybrid network architectures, office automation systems, and archival storage.