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Four industry leaders have finished their work on the Mount Rainier specification, a project to make writing, deleting, and rewriting data to a compact disc as simple as accessing a floppy disk.

Compaq Computer, Sony, Microsoft, and Koninklijke Philips Electronics came together in October last year to develop the specification for native support of CD-rewritable drives in PC operating systems. An official announcement is expected later this week.

"Mount Rainier offers drag-and-drop CD rewriting and on-the-fly formatting of the disc, making the CD the ideal floppy disk replacement," says Frank Simonis, commercial director of Philips Optical Storage, which coordinated the Mount Rainier group.

The first drives supporting Mount Rainier will be on the market mid-2001. Microsoft, however, won't include Mount Rainier in the first release--expected in the second half of this year--of Windows XP, its new operating system for consumers and business users.

"Mount Rainier won't make it into the first version of Windows XP. We expect it to be offered shortly after the release in software updates," says Hans Driessen, spokesperson for Philips Optical Storage.

The Mount Rainier specification is also designed for Linux.

Apple Computer has shown strong interest incorporating Mount Rainier in its MacOS operating system too, says Simonis.

Adding native support for the drives takes away the need to install separate software, like hardware drivers and CD-burning programs, to make a CD writer work, a major obstacle for corporate adoption of CD writing, according to Philips.

"The burden of multi-vendor support will be taken away, as a single vendor will now also support the CD-RW drives. Also, staff will not need to be instructed on how to use special CD-writing software," says Driessen.

In addition to the 4 core companies, close to 40 others joined the group and are supporting quick adoption of Mount Rainier. Among the backers are Acer, Dell Computer, Matsushita Electric Industrial, and Plextor.

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