Stringy Floppy
A magnetic tape drive developed by Exatron, Sunnyvale, CA, for the Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer. Introduced in 1979, the drive read the continuous-loop cartridge of 1/16" tape, called a "tape wafer," more than 10 times as fast as the TRS-80's data cassettes. A handful of games and applications were offered in the format, and Exatron sold several thousand Stringy Floppy drives before the floppy disk obsoleted them. The wafer's capacity was approximately a thousand bytes per foot. |
| A Stringy Floppy |
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| This 35-foot tape wafer held about 34KB of data. The continuous loop of tape snapped, which was a common problem with these wafers, and the arrow points to the end of the tape. (Image courtesy of Terry Stewart, www.classic-computers.org.nz) |
stringy floppy [′striŋ·ē ′fläp·ē]
(computer science)
A peripheral storage device for microcomputers that uses a removable magnetic tape cartridge with a ¹⁄₁₆-inch-wide (1.5875-millimeter) loop of magnetic tape.
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