As I recall... 1) Tape drives, at least the common 1/4" cartridge types from folks like Wangtek and Adaptec, came with QIC-36 or QIC-02 PC interfaces before SC

As I recall... 1) Tape drives, at least the common 1/4" cartridge types from folks like Wangtek and Adaptec, came with QIC-36 or QIC-02 PC interfaces before SCSI. Lots of those were sold. It was nice when the SCSI ones became common, since you didn't have to have a separate controller board for your tape. The cartridges were cheap (relatively), but the drive/controller certainly wasn't. Reliable, tho. 2) If you had the right software, tapes could have a TOC written at the beginning. Not random access, but it allowed you to 'fast forward' to the files you were interested in. Saved tons of time, but definitely not as good as a ZIP. 3) Many of the 'micro tape' drives from folks like Irwin (DC1000?) were as often as not attached to the floppy controller. Still better than swapping floppies. And I had a ton of external ones that were parallel port attached. I didn't see a lot of SCSI ones, but they surely existed. Not so reliable in my experience. 4) Tangentially, there were at least 2 vendors that attached 9-track tape drives (the big reel to reel ones) to PCs, and at least 1 that attached a VCR as a tape drive. Neither took off. 5) For a long time back then (6 years sounds about right) virtually everyone I knew in creative fields (advertising, music, visual art, etc) had a ZIP drive. To the extent that if I saw someone with some ZIP drive a reasonable ice-breaker was "so are you an artist?". Unbeatable combination of capacity, speed & cost relative to disk drives, as long as you had good backups.