The Mother of (all) Dragon(s) (peripherals)
Ah, the Dragon 32. An extremely close cousin of the Tandy (Radio Shack) Color Computer. Proudly built in Wales.
The Dragon32. Guess how much RAM it had.
Like most other home machines released around this time, the default data storage medium was the cassette tape. It was extremely slow, and there was nothing worse than waiting several minutes for a program (OK game) to load and then have it crash at the last minute.
Some machines had specific “datacorders”, such as Commodore and Atari. Others, like the Dragon 32, could theoretically use any cassette player with a headphone out (for loading) and a microphone in (for saving). Oddly enough, cheaper tape recorders seemed to perform better than more expensive ones.
Anyway, the solution for cassette loading woes was a floppy disk drive. Like many other machines, the Dragon32 was marketed as add-on peripherals “coming soon”. The Dragon floppy drive was about a year late (which, surprisingly, was considered “not bad”, thanks to the likes of Oric and Sinclair Research), but it finally arrived in September 1984.
It was a 5/25” drive that stored a whopping 180KB of data. It could cause display problems if your drive was too close to the TV, but a bit of moving and wiggling of the aerial cable would improve things somewhat.
The only slight fly in the ointment? At 275 pounds, the disk drive cost 100 pounds more than the Dragon32…
Do I buy this or just get an extra Dragon32. I could start loading something from tape on the first one and keep working on the second…
