Cristie Electronics Ltd, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, has developed the first Floptical disk drive subsystem that enables users to connect Insite Peripherals Inc’s disk drive to any MS-DOS personal computer via the parallel printer port for backing up purposes: the subsystem can be used as another disk drive or for such applications as data archiving and interchange, […]
Cristie Electronics Ltd, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, has developed the first Floptical disk drive subsystem that enables users to connect Insite Peripherals Inc’s disk drive to any MS-DOS personal computer via the parallel printer port for backing up purposes: the subsystem can be used as another disk drive or for such applications as data archiving and interchange, software and database distribution as well as an alternative to upgrading hard disk drives; the product is called Lapwing because it is considered ideal for laptop computers; the Lapwing consists of Cristie’s proprietary controller and back-up software, and provides a 1.6Mbps data transfer rate; it also has a 65mS average seek time to 3M Co’s new 21Mb, 3.5 floptical disks, using a closed loop optical servo to follow the optical tracks in 3M’s disks; variable head modes each have two recording gaps to enable the drive to read and write not only to 3M’s disk, but also to existing 3.5 720Kb and 1.44Mb floppy disks; the first units were available from December 1, at UKP600, but volume shipments will not start until next January or February.
