Exatron Stringy Floppy

The company introduced an S-100 stringy floppy drive at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire, and a version for the Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1979.

The device is capable of reading and writing random access data files (unlike a datacassette).

If a record being sought has been overshot, the drive advances the tape until it loops around to the beginning and continues seeking from there.

[2] According to Embedded Systems magazine, the Exatron Stringy Floppy uses Manchester encoding, achieving 14K read-write speeds and the code controlling the device was developed by Li-Chen Wang, who also wrote a Tiny BASIC, the basis for the TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC.

[5] One complete cycle through a 20-foot (6.1 m) tape takes 55 to 65 seconds, depending on the number of files it contains.