The prevalence of 5 1/4" drives in 80's home computers appears to have been very regional. In Europe they seem to have been very rare and as you stated most hom

The prevalence of 5 1/4" drives in 80's home computers appears to have been very regional. In Europe they seem to have been very rare and as you stated most home users utilized cassette tape storage. At the time 5 1/4" drives were less expensive in the US and US households had significantly higher median incomes than those in many parts of Europe which led to much wider adoption of floppy drives in the US. In the 80's we had three family computers with 5 1/4" drives. A TRS-80 Model I, IBM PC XT and near the end of the 80's a Gateway 386 system. I believe the 386 system also included a 3 1/2" drive. In addition I had my own Commodore 64 with a 5 1/4" floppy. All of my friends, which was a decent number, who had a C64 also had floppies. If you went into a store there was little to no software available on tape for any systems with the exception of Radio Shacks where they had tape based software for Tandy Coco's which were not particularly popular systems.