Chuck, > Oh, you mean the Japanese TD disks. As far as I know only one machine > was produced that used them, the NEC PC 88-VA3: > > https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3
Yep, that the one. > > It was an expensive market flop. You might try to hunt down a drive if > you're a collector, but as far as I know, the PC88-VA3 systems never > made it outside of Japan. No interest in collecting. I am just surprised it didn't catch on assuming cost of drive and media wasn't atrocious. In 1989 I was still using a 5160 w/ a 10MB HDD (in fact I ran Win 3 on that machine with a NEC CPU upgrade). Having an almost formatted capacity of 10MB, on even a $10 floppy disk, would have been phenomenal. That’s why I am surprised these floppy alternatives did not catch on especially when the ZIP drive took over the market like wild fire without even offering backward compatibility.... > > Still have my Caleb UHD144 drives, though--144MB on a 3.5" preformatted > floppy. Drive also reads and writes 1.44M and 720K floppies. >From what I understand the Caleb was too little too late. Zip had already >established dominance and LS120 was on the market. > > And, then there was the Sony HiFD--another disaster. Well when the first generation becomes known for mangling your data.... I blame Sony and poor execution for that one. If they had done it right a 200MB 3.5" disk drive in the late 90s would have still been awesome especially since it had backwards compatibility. I think the same can be said of the LS240 drives half a decade sooner in introduction and they would have taken over everything. -Ali
