On 15/05/2017 5:28 PM, Ian McCall wrote:
> On 2017-05-15 09:22:44 +0000, Ian McCall  said:
>
>> On 2017-05-11 04:52:13 +0000, rbernardo@iglou.com said:
>>
>>> ...To read about what they say about the Datasette, see
>>>
>>>
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/g3075/the-forgotten-media-of
-yesteryear/?src=nl&mag=pop&list=nl_pnl_news&date=050917
>>>
>
> Very
>
> few
>>>
>> people in Europe had the disk drive - was seen as an expensive luxury.
>> 'Cousin of the Microdrive'?! It really wasn't, it was a straight
>> forward load-from-tape system that every other 8 bit had as well.
>> Probably closest to the BBC's handling of tape drives, which could
>> autorewind (and had the life saving "load by block" feature which
>> meant if the load was corrupt, you just had to rewind past the first
>> corrupted block and try again.).
>>
>> Microdrive was very different and almost -no-one- had that.
>
> Have just noticed they put in the ST-506 too. Forgotten?! That's just a
> hard drive. It was the first model I bought, and I connected it up to an
> Atari ST in a home-built enclosure with separately-bought ASCI (yep, not
> SCSI) controller and a PSU for it.
>

ST-506 drives were common at one time, hardly a forgotten format.

More forgotten would be the tape port on the original IBM-PC and it's
built in BASIC which continued to be present long after the tape port
had been abandoned.

Not sure if there was ever a IBM-PC specific drive available though.

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