Exatron Stringy Floppy
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 Lua error in Module:Convert at line 452: attempt to index field 'titles' (a nil value). thick.[1] The magnetic tape itself is Lua error in Module:Convert at line 452: attempt to index field 'titles' (a nil value). 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[citation needed] than a data cassette, and half the price[citation needed] of a floppy disk.
Wafers were available with tape lengths ranging from 5 to 75 feet.[1]:{{{3}}} Known data capacities/tape length are: 4 KB/5 feet, 16 KB/20 feet, 48 KB/50 feet, and 64 KB/75 feet.[2]
