In 1986 I bought the Holy Grail of sequencers, the Roland MC-500 for $2195. I got the MKS-7 sound module to go with it (Half price $1200) and set down to learn how to program songs (I add a Yamaha drum module with Latin percussion sounds for $495). In a few days I had my first sequence down, a rough version of Stand By Me.
The MC-500 held the data for around 8 normal songs in its ram. The storage was on the fairly new 3.5″ floppy disk that MacIntosh computers used but, believe it or not, was 6 years old at the time.
In 1980, the 3.5 inch floppy drive and diskette was introduced by Sony which - while fighting its losing battle supporting the Betamax video format against the VHS - fought off challenges from 2.0, 2.5, 2.8, 3.0, 3.25, and 4.0 inch formats. Although a dying technology today’s standard 3.5″ diskette hold a formatted capacity of about 1.5 megabytes while still using the same basic technology of the old 8″ drives.
My producer friend Van Wilmot got me into the Roland system and I’m still there. (No kidding! I have floppies all over the place but I’m too old and cheap to move along to flashdrives) He sold me 2 Sony diskettes for the amazing price of $10 each from a stock that was sent to him from Toronto. In the stores they were selling for $12-$15.
It’s hard to believe that the double-sided (DD) 720 kb disks went for that much but that’s what they cost. But then an IBM XT with a 20 Meg hard drive cost almost $4000. In a year they came down to around $2.00 each and then lower. You can get them online for about 18 cents each.