Exatron manufactures a series of automated handling, testing, programming, and marking equipment for the packaged
integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
industry.
Products
Exatron designs, develops, manufactures, markets, and services a wide variety of I.C. component handling and testing equipment. Exatron products are used in the testing and programming of PLDs and other integrated circuits.
Stringy Floppy and Entrepo
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Exatron designed and manufactured the
Exatron Stringy Floppy
An Exatron Stringy Floppy (cover removed) designed for use with the TRS-80 Model 1
The Exatron Stringy Floppy (or ESF) is a continuous-loop tape drive developed by Exatron.
History
The company introduced an S-100 stringy floppy drive at th ...
(ESF) tape storage device for a variety of
microcomputers
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PC ...
.
Coleco
Coleco Industries, Inc. was an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company. It was a successful toy company in the 1980s, mass-producing versions of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game console ...
also planned to use the ESF in their
Colecovision
ColecoVision is a second-generation home video-game console developed by Coleco and launched in North America in August 1982. It was released a year later in Europe by CBS Electronics as the CBS ColecoVision.
The console offered a closer expe ...
Super Game Module; however, it ultimately proved to be unsuitable for the amounts and types of accesses that games inflict (the Super Game Module ended up being shelved in favor of the
Adam
Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...
computer, which used a different type of tape drive that Coleco developed internally).
Around this same time, Exatron announced that it was changing its name to Entrepo. From ''Video Games'' magazine, June 1983, page 49:
:"Last February the Exatron Corporation changed its name to Entrepo (meaning "a storage place")."
This name change caused some people to believe that there were two manufacturers of Stringy Floppy tape drives, when in fact there were not. Note that since the company's present name is still Exatron, it is unclear if this name change never actually took place or if it was changed back at some point.
The ESF was available by mail-order through A&J Micro Drive, a related company.
References
{{Reflist
External links
Official Web Site
Electronics companies of the United States