PerSci Advert - December 1978
From Byte - The Small Systems Journal
PerSci delivers the Dual-Headed Diskette Drive
Peripheral Sciences - or PerSci - with its dual-headed dual-floppy unit, was going up against companies like Shugart which had just introduced the 5¼" floppy.
Ignoring their size, these huge 8" drives still had some advantages as they were capable of storing a total of 3.2Mb, in an era when the very first "Winchester" hard drives could generally store only 5 or 10Mb.
They were also IBM compatible, but not in the sense of the PC, which wouldn't be launched for another 3 years, but in terms of IBM's 3740 media devices.
It's a nice advert showing hundreds of the drive units on a production line, at a time when it was still common to advertise just a floppy unit which often cost more than the computer it was attached to - about $1,000 in 1977, or £6,000 in 2025 terms. The price of floppy drives had dropped to around £5 for a 1.44Mb 3½" floppy by 2001.
Date created: 01 July 2012
Last updated: 11 December 2024
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