Tabor TC500 Drivette! Woohoo!

[olePigeon]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/130654722316?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649#ht_500wt_1036

I won the auction! Only bidder! Wahoo! I've been scavenging the internet for one of these, they seem to be pretty darn rare.

If you don't know what this is, it's a 5 1/4" floppy drive and disk that's been shrunk down by 2". It's a 3 1/4" floppy drive. It uses miniature floppy disks. |) The cool thing is that it works off a standard 5 1/4" controller card. Holds about half the size of a standard 1.2 MB floppy.

Now I just need to find some disks, which are just as rare as the darn drive. I think there're a few people on the Vintage Computer Forum that might have some. I'll see if anyone's willing to sell a few.

Attached is a picture so you can get an idea of the scale:

 

[Gorgonops]

Wow, that's an... interesting, find. Hopefully you at least have an Amdek Amdisk 3" to display alongside it.

I remember they made just enough of those things for them to find their way to the various electronics surplus dealers, IE, searching Google Books finds an ad in a 1987 issue of Popular Science from "American Design Components" in which they're selling off both bare drives and "kits" for interfacing the drives to IBM PCs, Apple IIs, and... IBM PCjrs. I wonder how many units of these were actually made. It appears they hit the market around late 1982, and they must of been sold up to around 1985 to have ended up inside a PCjr expansion, but there's practically nothing about them to be found online other than some timeline entries and claims that the disk format was actually invented by Dysan. (Which did so because they thought the market needed a "microfloppy" format whose disks didn't require the existing makers of 8" and 5.25" disks to extensively retool their factories.)

 

[Cosmo]

Great find, that is really interesting!

I've never seen one nor knew there were such made. Probl. not sold in Finland at time.

 

[olePigeon]

I put out a post on Craiglist. Since Dysan was based in San Jose, I'm hoping someone in the greater Bay Area might still have a few boxes of these sitting around. Maybe a former or current computer shop owner. *crosses fingers*

I found an 8" Floppy Drive as well. That sucker is HUGE. Not sure if it's working, there's something rattling inside of it.

Here's an advert for the drive and media:

 

[Cosmo]

Those drives and disks are rare indeed, let's hope some do turn out somewhere.

What comes to 8" drives, those were HUGE. I remember we had those at work wich we trashed in somewhere in mid 1990's. We had new 8" disks (BASF) in sealed boxes till late 1990's, none were sold :lol: I kept just one disk. Too bad, should have saved them all, but.. this is how it goes.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

That is seriously cool.

In the weird and wild magnetic media department, I have a Texas Instruments CC-40 with the prototype wafertape drive I got from a fellow collector. I hear they have serious reliability issues though. I bet yours will do a lot better in that department.