29 Mar
2023
29 Mar
'23
2:18 a.m.
Chuck,
Oh, you mean the Japanese TD disks. As far as I know
only one machine
was produced that used them, the NEC PC 88-VA3:
https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3
Yep, that the one.
It was an expensive market flop. You might try to hunt down a drive if
you're a collector, but as far as I know, the PC88-VA3 systems never
made it outside of Japan.
No interest in collecting. I am just surprised it didn't catch on assuming cost of
drive and media wasn't atrocious. In 1989 I was still using a 5160 w/ a 10MB HDD (in
fact I ran Win 3 on that machine with a NEC CPU upgrade). Having an almost formatted
capacity of 10MB, on even a $10 floppy disk, would have been phenomenal. That’s why I am
surprised these floppy alternatives did not catch on especially when the ZIP drive took
over the market like wild fire without even offering backward compatibility....
Still have my Caleb UHD144 drives, though--144MB on a 3.5" preformatted
floppy. Drive also reads and writes 1.44M and 720K floppies.
From what I understand the Caleb was too little too late. Zip had already established
dominance and LS120 was on the market.
And, then there was the Sony HiFD--another disaster.
Well when the first generation becomes known for mangling your data.... I blame Sony and
poor execution for that one. If they had done it right a 200MB 3.5" disk drive in the
late 90s would have still been awesome especially since it had backwards compatibility. I
think the same can be said of the LS240 drives half a decade sooner in introduction and
they would have taken over everything.
-Ali