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so, update: I didn't get it. It sold for quite a bit past my price range, probably & hopefully because I was bidding against a museum or two. BEHOLD!pic.twitter.com/JSvrIlwWPp
So what the fuck is that? well, let's answer the easy part. The floppy is a 3.25" Flex Diskette. Those are a rare floppy disk type that was designed as a sort of compromise for how to make a 3/3.5" disk: instead of making a whole new disk, why not just shrink the 5.25"?pic.twitter.com/F9Qsq3CvSP
that's what Dysan thought, since they already were making 5.25" disks. They added a central hub, but otherwise it's basically just a 5.25" disk. This was proposed as the New Disk, before the Sony model was chosen.
so the 3.25" is a sort of prototype disk and it's kinda amazing I have one at all. Supposedly they did see one use, in the Seequa Chameleon 325, an obscure variant of an obscure portable Z80/8088 PC.
So unless you find one of those rare portables, you're not finding a drive for a 3.25" Flex Diskette... and this is an external drive. so it's definitely from something else. So either we're wrong about what used it, or it's a prototype of something that never came out
So IBM was working on a 4" disk drive in the early 80s, which they called the DemiDiskette eventually. It was canceled before coming out.pic.twitter.com/HoPjtRaSGp
But you know what they labeled the drives when they were first showing them at trade shows? Tabor!
and there were pre-release versions of the Tabor disks that looked nothing like the "final" one. I've got one!pic.twitter.com/6urZIHNG9a
so, either: 1. this is a massive coincidence and Dysan decided to name their disks the same as upcoming IBM disks 2. It's a hoax someone is playing on floppy disk historians (all 5 of us) 3. Dysan at one point worked with IBM on Tabor prototype
but as far as I can tell, until this auction showed up, there was no hint of any Dysan disk called "Tabor" and no hint Dysan & IBM had worked together on any version of the DemiDiskette.
So, the auction pictures. The back seems to have some card edge connector, and an external power plug.pic.twitter.com/A3IR1IyTbv
The label seems to say TLC or TTC Tabor. Anyone recognize that logo? it also looks like it might be some kind of sticker, which'd make sense if it's a prototype.pic.twitter.com/0QkNbqYQCI
The disk definitely matches the Dysan Flex Diskette, other than the label. Interesting that the recorder number is "3251". The final one says 802950pic.twitter.com/b7MvhHRDOj
The auction does give a hint as to where this came from, which makes no sense at all. This came from the Estate of CB Wilson, who worked for Texas Instruments from 1967-2000.
I'm gonna see if I can message the winner to make sure we're in contact, because I'd love to see what's inside this and any additional info they have.
there's some weirdness going on with the auction. since it ended, they relisted it twice, deleting the first one, and then relisting it as "for glimminge only". glimminge is the person who won the first auction, and I think they re-listed it because of international shipping
and @ptrcnull pointed out that the logo is the same as the one on the TC500 drive, which I really should remember because I OWN ONEhttps://twitter.com/ptrcnull/status/1316015010758320130 …
which suggests it's related to Tabor Corporation, which was founded in 1982 and dissolved in 2000: So maybe it is just a coincidence? Tabor built drives for Dysan's 3.25" Flex Diskettes.pic.twitter.com/KIy2JW2oEY
A mention in Byte from October 1984 says that Tabor was only making 3.25" drives for the past year, before adding a 3.5" drivepic.twitter.com/vkZazCkEMM
This does add some other interesting info: Educational Microcomputer Systems had announced a 3.25" system but was changing it to 3.5", and General Scientific Corporation was shipping workstations with 3.25" drives.
BTW another possibility is that there's no IBM connection at all. The "fact" that the IBM disks were called "Tabor" at some trade shows has a [citation needed] on it and there don't seem to be any mentions of that on the web that don't relate back to wikipedia
so maybe the DemiDiskette was never called Tabor in the first place and this is just someone misremembering something from 40 years ago and stuffing it into wikipedia
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