Home computer: Difference between revisions

Eventually mass production of 5.25" drives resulted in lower prices, and after about 1984 cassette drives were phased out of the US home computer market. 5.25" floppy disk drives would remain standard until the end of the 8-bit era. Though external 3.5" drives were made available for home computer systems toward the latter part of the 1980s, mostalmost all software sold for 8-bit home computers remained on 5.25" disks; 3.5" drives were used for data storage. Standardization of disk formats was not common; sometimes even different models from the same manufacturer used different disk formats. Toward the end of the home computer era, drives for a number of home computer models appeared offering disk-format compatibility with the IBM PC. The disk drives sold with the Commodore 128, Amiga and Atari ST were all able to read and write PC disks, which themselves were undergoing the transition from 5.25" to 3.5" format at the time. [[Hard drive]]s were never popular on home computers, remaining an expensive, niche product mainly for [[BBS]] hobbyists.