Stringy Floppy

stringy floppy

[′striŋ·ē ′fläp·ē] (computer science) A peripheral storage device for microcomputers that uses a removable magnetic tape cartridge with a ¹⁄₁₆-inch-wide (1.5875-millimeter) loop of magnetic tape.

Stringy Floppy

Ask your colleagues how many Stringy Floppies their computers have and expect a bewildered reaction. Nothing to do with "strings of text" or "string theory," a Stringy Floppy was a magnetic tape drive for the Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer. Introduced in 1979 by Exatron in Sunnyvale, California, the drive read a continuous-loop cartridge of 1/16" tape 10 times faster than Radio Shack's cassette drives. A handful of games and applications were offered in this "tape wafer" format, and several thousand drives were sold before the floppy disk made them obsolete. See TRS-80 and how to spoof your techie friend.

A Stringy Floppy
This 35-foot tape wafer held about a thousand bytes of data per foot. The continuous loop of tape often broke, as shown in this photo (arrow points to the end of the snapped tape outside the reel). (Image courtesy of Terry Stewart, www.classic-computers.org.nz)