After a long wait, a working model of a disk drive system for the QL will soon be in the shops.

CST will be marketing its interface through Computermate (0782-811711) at a price of £150 excluding drives. It is hoping to have it in the high street shops in the next few weeks.

The cheapest complete system will weigh in at £250 for a single-sided 40 track double density system, giving 200K of storage.

Since CST has not used the infamously unavailable 8271 disk controller, the system has the ability, via the 1770 controller, to interface to any of the standard Shugart disk drives - 3", 3.5" and 5.25" - automatically. It can be used with virtually all drives currently available for the BBC Micro. It will run up to two drives giving a maximum of 1Mb of storage.

The system software is on ROM and gives a set of additional commands including random access files and wild card directories. The interface and ROM plug into the interface via a plug that looks remarkably like that on the BBC.