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· Announcement

Apple PC 5.25" Drive, Apple Tape Backup 40SC, AppleFax Modem and ImageWriter LQ

Apple announced four products in August 1987: Apple PC 5.25" Drive, Apple Tape Backup 40SC, AppleFax Modem and ImageWriter LQ. The day spanned Networking, Printers and Storage.

It was the 3rd of 3 dated moments the archive holds for 1987, 152 days after the previous one, 2 March 1987.

Apple PC 5.25" Drive product photograph

CC BY-SA 3.0

What Apple announced

Apple PC 5.25" Drive

Storage · Drives

The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a 5 +1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak at the recommendation of Mike Markkula, and manufactured by Apple Computer. It went on sale in June 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 (equivalent to $2,940 in 2025) including the controller card (which can control up to two drives) and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the 1977 Apple II personal computer to replace the slower cassette tape storage.

Apple produced at least six variants of the basic 5 +1⁄4-inch Disk II concept over the course of the Apple II series' lifetime: The Disk II, the Disk III, the DuoDisk, the Disk IIc, the UniDisk 5.25" and the Apple 5.25 Drive. While all of these drives look different, and use four different connector types, they're all electronically extremely similar. They can all use the same low-level disk format, and are all interchangeable with the use of simple adapters, consisting of no more than two plugs and wires between them. Most DuoDisk drives, the Disk IIc, the UniDisk 5.25" and the AppleDisk 5.25" even use the same 19-pin D-Sub connector, so they are directly interchangeable. The only 5 +1⁄4" drive Apple sold aside from the Disk II family was a 360k MFM unit made to allow Mac IIs and SEs to read PC floppy disks.

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Apple Tape Backup 40SC

Storage · Drives

The Apple Tape Backup 40SC is an external, SCSI-interfaced, 1⁄4-inch (6.35 mm) QIC, mini-cartridge tape drive. It was introduced by Apple Inc. in 1987 and discontinued in 1994. The drive came bundled with Retrospect backup software. The drive is also compatible with the tape software included with A/UX.

AppleFax Modem

Networking · Modems

The archive holds no written summary for this product. Its photographs, family, and dates are on its product page.

ImageWriter LQ

Printers · Printers · discontinued December 1990

The archive holds no written summary for this product. Its photographs, family, and dates are on its product page.

Also in 1987

Sources

  1. Apple PC 5.25" Drive · Wikipedia
  2. Apple Tape Backup 40SC · Wikipedia
  3. ImageWriter LQ · Wikipedia

Dates on this page are announcement dates, not shipping dates. Product summaries are drawn from the linked articles, and specification claims in them are the publisher’s, not independent testing. Photograph credits and licences are listed in full on the image credits page.