Rotronics Commodore Wafadrive Adaptor

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This Rotronics Wafadrive Adaptor was designed, as the name suggests, to provide the Spectrum Wafadrive system for use with Commodore computers.

However this is purely a development unit and was never put into the commercial market.

The Rotronics Wafadrive was a peripheral for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer, intended to compete with Sinclair's ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive. 1984

The Wafadrive comprised of two continuous loop "stringy floppy" tape drives, an RS-232 interface and Centronics parallel port.

The drives could run at two speeds, high speed for seeking and low speed for reading/writing, which was significantly slower than that of Microdrives. The cartridges (or "wafers"), the same as those used in Entrepo stringy floppy devices for other microcomputers, were physically larger than Microdrive cartridges. They were available in three different capacities, nominally 16 kB, 64 kB or 128 kB.

The same drive mechanism, manufactured by BSR, and cartridges were used in a similar device known as the Quick Data Drive (QDD), designed to connect to the serial port of the Commodore 64 home computer.

We also have the original notes from the development team.

Date : 1985

Manufacturer : Rotronics

Physical Description : Wafadrive adaptor unit

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH30274. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.
 

Scan of Document: Rotronics Commodore Wafadrive Adaptor

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