This ECMA Standard specifies the physical and magnetic characteristics of a 3,81 mm wide magnetic tape cartridge to
enable physical interchangeability of such cartridges between drives. It also specifies the quality of the recorded
signals, the recording method and the recorded format - called Digital Data Storage 4 (DDS-4) - thereby allowing data
interchange between drives by means of such magnetic tape cartridges.
Information interchange between systems also requires, at a minimum, agreement between the interchange parties upon
the interchange code(s) and the specifications of the structure and labelling of the information on the interchanged
cartridge.
Under information interchange circumstances in which a processing algorithm, e.g. for lossless data compression as
specified in ECMA-151, is applied to the host data prior to recording on the tape and a complementary reprocessing
algorithm is applied after the data is read from the tape, agreement upon these by the interchange parties is also
required.
ECMA 288-1999 history
1999ECMA 288-1999 3,81 mm Wide Magnetic Tape Cartridge for Information Interchange - Helical Scan Recording - DDS-4 Format