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Atari Disk Drives

That's the Sony Series 35 Model 10 which came out around 1981. It was sold as a dedicated word processor, although I understand it could run it's own version of CP/M. The Sony SMC-70, introduced in 1982, featured a pair of 3.5" floppy drives. Here's one I displayed at a show last month: http://ahm.ath.cx/photos/sony-smc70-1.jpg
It's probably hard to make out in that photo, but the two diskettes there are: the early non-shutter version (left) and the later "auto shutter" version (right). Unlike the Mac, the diskettes are ejected manually.

I think the first machine I ever saw with a 3.5" floppy was some sort of Sord computer from Japan.
I can't remember what year that was, but it might have been as early as 1980.
 
There were two different versions of 3.5" drives that came out at about the same time, but Sony's is the one that caught on, and the other died on the vine. I'm not sure which one the Sord used.

--T
 
F1 Apricot was also among the first ones to use hard-case 3.5" disks. BTW, as mentioned there were a lot of odd formats: 3", 3.25", 3.5" and IBM reportedly was planning a 4" disk drive but scrapped it in favour of the 3.5" disks which appeared to be the surviving format.
 
carlsson said:
F1 Apricot was also among the first ones to use hard-case 3.5" disks. BTW, as mentioned there were a lot of odd formats: 3", 3.25", 3.5" and IBM reportedly was planning a 4" disk drive but scrapped it in favour of the 3.5" disks which appeared to be the surviving format.

AND, I've seen little bitty (1"?) disks that were used in early digital cameras.
 
barryp said:
carlsson said:
F1 Apricot was also among the first ones to use hard-case 3.5" disks. BTW, as mentioned there were a lot of odd formats: 3", 3.25", 3.5" and IBM reportedly was planning a 4" disk drive but scrapped it in favour of the 3.5" disks which appeared to be the surviving format.

AND, I've seen little bitty (1"?) disks that were used in early digital cameras.

An early model of Zenith portable (MiniSport) used 2" disks.

--T
 
How much does it cost to develop these units? I realize a lot of the technology can be reused from existing technologies, but it is not quite like cutting a 3.5" drive into three slices...
 
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