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The Exatron Stringy Floppy (or ESF) is a continuous loop tape drive developed by Exatron. The company introduced an S-100 stringy floppy drive at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire, and a version for the Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1979. Exatron sold about 4,000 TRS-80 drives by August 1981 for $249.50 each, stating that it was "our best seller by far". The tape cartridge is about the size of a business card, but about thick. The magnetic tape itself is wide. According to ''Embedded Systems'' magazine the Exatron Stringy Floppy uses Manchester encoding, achieving 14K read-write speeds and the code controlling the device was developed by Li-Chen Wang (who also wrote a Tiny BASIC, the basis for the TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC.) In the July 1983 issue of ''COMPUTE!'s Gazette'' the ESF for the Commodore VIC-20 and the 64 was reviewed. The April 1983 issue of ''Creative Computing'' reviews the Winter CES show where Texas Instruments showed the TI Compact Computer 40 (CC-40) which included an optional peripheral, "a wafertape digital tape drive similar to the Exatron Stringy Floppy (US$139)." Exatron pitched the ESF as "The viable alternative". The ESF was faster and more reliable than a data cassette, and half the price of a floppy disk. Wafers were available with tape lengths ranging from 5 to 75 feet. Known data capacities/tape length are: 4 KB/5 feet, 16 KB/20 feet, 48 KB/50 feet, and 64 KB/75 feet. ==See also== * ZX Microdrive * Rotronics Wafadrive 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Exatron Stringy Floppy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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