krebizfan
Veteran Member
Portable computers and calculators did often go for the disk drive over tape for the comparatively faster drives* attached to a serial port. The port itself would be the same speed. The owners of the unsold stringy floppy inventory wished it had been otherwise. Of course, slow audio tape had the virtue of being very cheap to implement.
Tape over 10KB/s would have needed something along the lines of a Sinclair Microdrive. New drive heads, new tape formulation improve handling of the data at the rate the heads worked, all put into working order before the disk drive volume pushes those prices below what the fast tape could be sold for. There were a number of companies that advertised high speed tape solutions that went out of business quickly because they couldn't convince enough to pay more for unproven tape than proven disk.
*These would be the 40 track 3.5" drives, the various spiral disk drives, stringy floppies, and a number of other devices that were too slow to see use in performance computers.
Tape over 10KB/s would have needed something along the lines of a Sinclair Microdrive. New drive heads, new tape formulation improve handling of the data at the rate the heads worked, all put into working order before the disk drive volume pushes those prices below what the fast tape could be sold for. There were a number of companies that advertised high speed tape solutions that went out of business quickly because they couldn't convince enough to pay more for unproven tape than proven disk.
*These would be the 40 track 3.5" drives, the various spiral disk drives, stringy floppies, and a number of other devices that were too slow to see use in performance computers.