TEAC founded in 1953, sort of

On August 29, 1953, the Tokyo Television Acoustic Company was founded. Later in the decade it merged with the Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company, and the combined company took the name TEAC. The combined company specialized in designing and manufacturing tape recorders. But retro computer enthusiasts know TEAC for its awesome floppy disk drives.

TEAC: The last name in floppy drives

I won’t say TEAC was the first name in disk drives. We have to give that placement to Shugart. After all, Shugart invented the floppy drive as we know it. But TEAC was the last name in disk drives for the better part of 30 years. TEAC wasn’t first but it didn’t take long for them to emerge as the best.

The quality of their drives was never any secret. They were the first disk drive manufacturer I ever heard referred to by name, and that’s because their drives were so good. I first read about them in an advice column where someone was having trouble with a floppy drive and the columnist said TEAC drives were the best. It seemed like an important thing to remember at the time.

A decade later, when I was selling computers at retail, we carried more than one brand of drive, but TEAC was the brand those of us who knew anything about computer hardware recommended. Sometimes it cost a little more, and sometimes it didn’t, but if you were buying for yourself, it was worth the small price difference.

Recognizing a TEAC floppy drive

You can recognize a 5.25 inch TEAC drive from its distinctive appearance. The drive activity LED is rectangular and in the top left corner of the drive. The latch to close the drive mechanism is on the right hand side of the drive. Most other drive manufacturers put the latch closer to the center of the drive, and on the same side as the activity LED.

On 3.5 inch drives, the size and position of the LED also differed from other makes, but wasn’t as distinctive.

If you are building a retro PC and want it to look and act like a machine that was owned by a discerning enthusiast of the time, you can do a lot worse than seeking out a pair of TEAC drives to install in it. The drives rarely need more than a cleaning to get them going again. TEAC drives can have trouble closing the mechanism, but that’s because of a sticky spindle. A sticky spindle in a TEAC drive is easy to fix.

Decoding TEAC floppy drive model numbers

TEAC 5.25-inch drive model numbers have a pattern. So if you spot a loose TEAC floppy drive in the wild, you can use this guide to figure out what the drive is.

• FD 55BR-### is a 360K DS/DD 5.25-inch drive
• FD 55GFR-### is a 1.2MB DS/HD 5.25-inch drive
• FD 505-### is a combination 3.5/5.25-inch DS/HD drive that fits in a single 5.25-inch bay
• FD 235HF-#### is a 3.5-inch DS/HD 1.44 MB floppy drive
• FD 235J-#### is a 3.5-inch 2.88 MB floppy drive

Moving on to optical drives

As the world moved on to optical media, TEAC also started producing CD-ROM drives and CD burners, although they were never as prolific as NEC, Mitsumi, Sony, LG, or Lite-On in this space. I knew they made them, but I never knowingly owned or used one, so I have no idea if their optical drives were as special as their floppy drives were.

Today, TEAC’s role in computer storage is diminished in this era of flash memory. But TEAC remain a major player in the production of recording equipment.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.