Short for quarter-inch cartridge, QIC was first introduced in 1983 as a low cost magnetic data tape storage used for backing up data and was the first tape drive standard. Although some QIC disks and drives are compatible with one another, verify the compatibility with the manufacturer before purchasing a QIC tape or drive. QIC disks are available in various sizes; however, they are commonly 40 MB to 25 GB.
Many computers and some servers utilized the QIC-40 and QIC-80 for a replacement of the floppy disk drive and commonly connected to the floppy controller. QIC is commonly labeled as QIC-XXXX-XX, where the first four Xs (but there could be two or three) may be a number used to identify the tape. These numbers usually indicate the size of the tape, but not always.
Below is a listing of commonly used QIC tapes and their capacity.
Computer acronyms, DAT, Tape terms
