Exatron Stringy Floppy
Tape Data Recovery - Exatron Stringy Floppy
The Exatron Stringy Floppy (ESF) was a wafer thin tape cassette digital storage medium introduced by Exatron in 1979. ESF was developed for use in the Tandy TRS-80 microcomputer from Radio Shack, but was used in other models as well. The TRS-80 Model 1 was the first personal computer from Radio Shack.
ESF magnetic tape was 1/16-inch wide. Its cartridge was about the size of a credit card, but was about twice thick. The Stringy Floppy used Manchester encoding, a form of self clocking encoding method, and achieved 4K read/write speeds.
ESF was faster than the audio cassettes used for data storage in the earlier TRS-80s. They were an inexpensive storage option for high speed data storage. An operation that could take 10 minutes with a tape would take just 10 seconds with an ESF. ESF unit could work with 16k RAM and needed at least 32k disk space. Operating system was firmware, which is built into the unit using some of the unoccupied RAM.
ESF was a popular option. Exatron sold thousands of units of these wafer tapes. On the down side, wafers worn out rather quickly, leading to parity errors and cacophonous noise. With the advent of floppy disks, ESF became obsolete.
ESF units were initialized using a command SYSTEM, then typing /12345 <new line>. After that, the commands such as @load and @save are used accordingly.
