The computer industry – and the computer press – is energised and driven by technological breakthroughs, but frequently products that appear on announcement to have irresistible sex appeal prove commercial disappointments when marketing finally starts. Just such a product is Konica Inc’s 11Mb floppy disk drive. Newsbytes reports that the drive, unveiled at Comdex/Fall ’86, is now available, but has by no means taken the market by storm as the Japanese camera company had hoped. There is a controller for the drive, but it comes from a small, not widely-known company, Union City, California-based Trantor Systems Ltd, and the drive has been available in a handful of US retail stores and from resellers for the past nine months. The assembly consists of the drive connected to an internal AT board and typically sells for $815 – that is the price at Black Ship Computers of South San Francisco – but the store finds that, despite the ability to read 1.2Mb floppies, the price is proving a drag on sales. The disks are also pricey at $17 apiece.
