Standard ECMA-196

Standard ECMA-196
Data Interchange on 12,7 mm 36-Track Magnetic Tape Cartridges

(December 1993)

This Ecma Standard specifies the physical and magnetic characteristics of 12,7 mm wide, 36-track magnetic tape cartridges to enable interchangeability of such cartridges. It also specifies the quality of the recorded signals, the format and the recording method, thus allowing, together withStandard ECMA-13 or equivalent, full data interchange by means of such magnetic tape cartridges.

This Standard specifies two types of cartridge which, for the purposes of this Standard, are referred to as Cartridge System Tape (CST) and Extended Capacity Cartridge System Tape (ECCST), and contain tape of different thicknesses and lengths.

CST cartridges have a nominal uncompressed capacity of approximately 400 Mbytes.

ECCST cartridges have a nominal uncompressed capacity of approximately 800 Mbytes.

This Ecma Standard specifies extensions and modifications to the recorded format that is described in Standard ECMA-152.

These extensions and modifications

increase the number of tracks recorded on the tape from 18 to 36. Actual recordings will be made 18 tracks at a time requiring two complete passes of the tape, one from the beginning of tape to the end of tape and the other from the end of tape to the beginning of tape;
specify a different method of defining the ECC characters used to detect and correct errors when the data is read from the tape.

The following file can be freely downloaded:

File name	Size (Bytes)	Content
ECMA-196.pdf	5 476 162	Acrobat (r) PDF file

This Ecma publication is also approved as ISO/IEC 14251.

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