Exatron Stringy Floppies

From: Al Hartman <alhartman_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Mar 1 12:28:00 2003

When these drives came out, they were touted as being
"as good as a regular floppy drive".

Being 18, and of limited funds... I remember drooling
over the flyers thinking of getting two of these
drives and a bunch of tapes.

My friends in the local TRS-80 Users Group kept
talking me out of that (Kings Byte in Brooklyn).

I guess, in retrospect... I'm glad they did.

I remember that before I went to disk drives on my
E/I, I used to load Level III BASIC (From Microsoft),
which had corrected Cassette loading routines) when I
would type in programs from magazines.

I'm somewhat bummed out that my old Model I is kaput.
I've got a bid on another non-working unit locally in
South NJ, and if I can win that... I'm hoping to
combine the two units into one working one.

My old Model I is like a spaghetti factory inside,
having the following mods:

- Electric Pencil Lowercase Mod
- Dennis Kitsz High Speed Mod (auto switching when
disk drives or cassette are accessed).
- Inverse Video (my friend added this, I hate it!)
- Internal Speaker attached to cassette port (for game
sounds)
- Internal Alpha joystick adapter (just some diodes
and a connector)
- Reset Button
- External Keyboard connector
- Composite Video Out
- Upgraded keyboard with keypad (it didn't have that
originally)
- XRX Mod (for more reliable tape loading
- Gold Plugs

But, the unit is a mess inside.

I'd like to strip out a lot of the junk and see if I
can get it working again.

I've asked my friend who did the mods originally if
he'd do that for me.

Hopefully, the non-working unit I have my eye on is
just a case of loose video RAM chips as the owner said
it worked before he sold it to another buyer, and
after it arrived it booted up with garbage on the
screen.

So, I'm hoping that opening the case and reseating
some chips will fix it.

I did a search and the 21L02 chips (1k x 8) for the
video ram upgrade for Lowercase are still available.
So, I can add the lowercase mod to it. And I can swap
character generator chips with my old unit if need be.

I'm hoping one of my two E/I's is still working so I
can use it with this keyboard unit.

Nostalgia...


As for the A&J units, they worked pretty well when I
used them at Zebra Systems. I used to load the
Terminal program for the 2068 Modem onto one, so I
could load it faster...

I had a few carts tangle (like an 8 track player), but
not many.

It's funny, but in the Dennis Kitsz book he had a
project to modify an 8 track recorder/player to serve
as a mass storage device. The forerunner of Stringy
Floppies and later Tape Drives, I guess....

I leafed through that book yesterday. What fun stuff
there is in there....

I still have the whole series. Especially Disk and
Other Mysteries.. Which was like my Bible back then. I
can't remember how many hosed disks I recovered using
that...

Regards,
Al Hartman
Received on Sat Mar 01 2003 - 12:28:00 GMT