Below appears the introduction from an article I wrote in early 2002 for a university technical writing course. What is it about? If you want the basics, Wikipedia has this great overview:

“FMD or Fluorescent Multilayer Disc (FMD), is an optical disc format developed by Constellation 3D [CD3] that uses fluorescent, rather than reflective materials to store data. Reflective disk formats (such as CD and DVD) have a practical limitation of about two layers, primarily due to interference, scatter, and intra-layer cross talk. However, the use of fluorescence allows FMDs to have up to 100 layers. These extra layers allow FMDs to have capacities up to a terabyte, while maintaining the same physical size of traditional optical disks.”

Basically, this product was way ahead of its time, but C3D folded and the product was abandoned … well, for a while, anyway. Supposedly, the technology was picked up D Data Inc. in 2003, but nothing has come out of that corp. either. Meanwhile, the technologically inferior Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just appearing on international markets. Sigh … another format war! Anyway, if you want to know more here is my full-length article on FMD.

SCOPE OF RESEARCH The purpose of this report was to determine whether investment in companies supporting FM technology is – or will be – a sensible decision. To accomplish this goal, a complete technical analysis of the technology was conducted, as were format-to-format comparisons. Also examined were cooperative agreements and partnerships among companies supporting FM technology. Read more…