Supra Corporation (Amiga)

Supra Corporation (Amiga)

For a number of years, Commodore's Amiga line of computers enjoyed wide third party support. In this ad from the December/January 1991 issue of Amiga Plus, Supra is advertising several Amiga compatible products.

The first item is an external floppy drive. The Amiga 500 (pictured) had one 3.5" disk drive built-in but a second drive was quite useful, especially given the cost of hard drives at the time. A (relatively) inexpensive floppy drive was a good way to add disk capacity and reduce disk swapping without breaking the bank. I suspect that Supra's choice was a little bit less expensive that Commodore's version.

The SupraDrive Removable was a SyqQuest cartridge system. These accepted disks that were like removable hard drives. I'm not sure which capacity this drive is but they were available in 44MB, 88MB and 200MB. They were sort of like an earlier version of zip drives and were common for shuffling files around, particular on Macintosh computers, related to desktop publishing. As this drive was SCSI based, it would work with most computers with a SCSI interface. These drives along with the cartridges they used were pretty expensive so this wasn't something you were likely to have unless you had a real need. Zip drives when they came along a few years later were much cheaper and CD-R followed quickly after that.

Finally, the SupraModem 2400 is listed. 2400bps was a pretty decent speed for 1991 though available modem speeds were rapidly increasing by this point. Within 4 or 5 years 56k modems would be arriving and broadband was right around the corner after that. Still, the SupraModem was a good and relatively inexpensive choice for getting online with BBSs or services like CompuServe at the time. The U.S. Robotics Courier line of modems was the luxury choice at the time but those were much more expensive.