Trace Machine

A very expensive (in the late 1980’s to early 1990’s it was about £15000 in the UK) mass duplication system for floppy disks made by Trade Products.

Worked with an attached controller system based on Unix. They used predefined datafiles to show it how a disk was laid out. This was very important for implementing custom disk formats and Copy Protection as even it could not do a “blind write” of an image, it had to be told how to do it.

The data files were written in a disk format scripting language called Freeform.