On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Chandra Bajpai wrote: They are scarce with good tapes but sold well in their time. Rare, not really. The technology was continious loop AKA 8track carts and was an outgrowth of modified 8track decks using shortend tapes (usually 5 minutes). with 8 data tracks that was roughly like having a 20minute tape and at 4800 that was a lot of bits. the stringyfloppy was the same save it was two or four tracks and used narrow .140 tape (casette width) rather that the 8track sized (.250") in a very much smaller cart. The design tricks were saturation recording (phase or NRZ), using the splice point as index. The basic scheme was to record a header and data not unlike floppy but at slower 2400 or 4800 baud rates. Since the tape speed was fixed you could easily rewrite a block after the header passed making it block replaceable like floppy. Fast forward was used to skip blocks as a speed up. also start stop was used. It's problem was that like most continous loop tapes the media life was poor and there were problems with binding. I had tried 8tracks for continous loop floppy emulation before the trs80 came out so I'd already found out about the media problem. I went to a casette based scheme instead. Allison