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History (1992): First Tape Product by Iomega

One-inch QIC unit without belt listed at $299 for external version

Mostly known for its flexible Bernoulli boxes, Iomega Corp. (Roy, UT) has developed for the first time a minicartridge drive for PCs, the Tape250, a one-inch QIC unit to read Irwin Ez tapes.

History 1992 Tape Iomega

The advent of US disk manufacturers in the magnetic cartridge segment seems to be linked to the massive departure of employees from Archive.

After Conner Peripheral, it’s now Iomega’s turn to launch a 3.5-inch streamer, the Tape250, developed by its subsidiary Iotape in San Diego, CA, just where Archive has its HQs.

This new actor’s idea is to become a specialist in all removable media drives for microcomputers, with Bernoulli disks and now small tape minicartriges.

Before the end of the year, there will be a new 20MB diskette based on Insite Peripherals’ technology.

The Tape250 is the only haft-inch high tape drive, which means it fits into a 3.5-inch floppy disk bay. It’s the first one to accept QIC and Irwin formats, and the only one to use no belt, which makes it more reliable,” says Srini Nageshwar, SVP of European operations.

For the entire DC 2000 minicartridge segment, a fast growing market, Peripheral Strategies forecasts WW sales of one million drives or the equivalent of $205 million this year.

There are 2 writing formats on DC 2000, the OIC 80 leaded by Colorado Memory Systems (Loveland, CO), and the AccuTrack owned by Irwin, from the Archive group, with large customers like IBM or Compaq.

The Tape250 can read and write 80MB QIC 80 and QIC 40, but only read the AccuTrack. This is for the backward compatibility.

But this device also accepts the new QIC 120 minicartridges that can store as much as 240MB.

With the drive comes the backup software for Windows from CentralPoint Software that includes a data compression module.

In the unit, the standard belts were replaced by small gear-wheels.

The external version, list priced at $299, includes a cable that can fit in the diskette drive connector, but brings slow transfer rate of 62KB/s, except when you use an optional card. An internal version that fits into a standard 3.5-inch bay is available.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠54, published on July 1992.

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