SWTPC Advert - November 1977

South West Technical Products Corporation was a company that had started out in the late 1960s producing electronics kits, selling much of its output via articles published in Popular Electronics.

By early 1975 it had produced its first terminal, also in kit form, but by the end of that year it was offering a kit for a complete microcomputer, based upon Motorola's 6800 processor.

By the year of this advert, it was still offering the same 6800-based computer kit, but now with 4K memory and floppy disks for a total of about £11,900 in 2025 money.

The bundle included the typewriter/VDU interface, the 6800 computer itself and - the focus of the advert - the $995 (£5,940) dual-Shugart floppy unit that was more expensive than the other two components put together.

The name "minifloppy" specifically refers to Shugart's 5¼" system, as it was a trademarked name.

Previously, floppy drives were 8" monsters, but Shugart - founded by Alan Shugart, who went on to start Seagate in 1979 - had developed the more compact and user-friendly 5¼" floppy in 1976, apocryphally "to be the size of a [folded] restaurant table napkin".

Not content with that, the company released the SASI interface in 1979. This evolved into SCSI - a fundamentally important interface for storage devices and peripherals like scanners for a couple of decades.