Quarter Inch Cartridge: Encyclopedia II - Quarter Inch Cartridge - QIC

Quarter Inch Cartridge - QIC

The first QIC tapes were the 5.875 in by 3.875 in Data Cartridge (DC) format with two internal belt-driven reels and a metal base. They were introduced in 1972 by 3M. The original QIC tape format standard was QIC-11, which was a four-track format giving 20 MB on a 450 ft DC300XL cartridge. Later DC formats included QIC-24 (nine-track, 45 MB or 60MB on a 450 or 600 ft (DC600A) cartridge respectively), QIC-120 (15-track, 125 MB on a DC600A), QIC-150 (18-track, 150 MB, DC6150 cartridge), and QIC-525 (26-track, 525 MB on a 1000 ft DC6525 cartridge).

Other QIC DC standards included the QIC-02 and QIC-36 drive interface standards. Later QIC DC drives usually used the SCSI interface.

Later, the smaller Minicartridge (MC) form-factor was introduced. This was 2.375 in by 3.125 in in size and was small enough to fit in a 3.5 in drive bay. The QIC-40 and QIC-80 MC formats held 40 and 80 megabytes, respectively. They were designed to use the same controller as a standard floppy drive, with MFM or RLL encoding.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "QIC", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki