This is the first one, the one that started it all.

OK, it didn't start much, but musicians and studios loved it. CD pressing plants also preferred to have their pre-masters sent on DAT, as early home-burned CDs proved to have way too much BLER errors. For these uses and tiny markets, D.A.T. was the king.
Sometime after its introduction, and with minor alterations, Sony turned the DTC-1000ES into the 2 box professional PCM-2500A/B and then into a 1 box professional PCM-2500... But it was possible to tweak the "A" to function all by itself without its "B" counterpart.

Still, whether 1000 or 2500, there was no ABS time, no margin indicator or END id. Just a good old counter... expect a 1'50" counter drift on a 120 tape! On the good side were its indestructible mechanism and excellent converters - still today: not really linear but lively.

Spearheading the format from as early as 1982, Sony, with its long and successful VCR/PCM experience, produced D.A.T. recorders aplenty. Some were afflicted by recurring over-heating and "tape-eating" symptoms - even in the pro lineups. But you can not go wrong with anything named DTC-1000ES, DTC-1500ES, DTC-2000ES or PCM-2500.

The 1000ES was also sold in Japan under the Excelia badge (Aiwa's upper grade range) and the XD-001 moniker ; it bore a very different faceplate but was a DTC-1000ES just the same. A non-ES version (DTC-1000) was also available, seemingly only in the US market...

The PCM-2500A also saw a professional version named DRD-100 : DAT tape duplicators made to be linked together - you can see a stack of those just below. The DRD-100 remained available until the late 1990s.

A MOST insteresting 1987 review is available here - do read it !

If the DTC-1000ES knew nothing about SCMS, it knew about copy prohibition and it still does: no second generation digital copy shall be allowed if a 'copy prohibit' flag is present on the tape to be copied. And it couldn't record at 44.1kHz, whether in digital or analog mode.

There is a recent surge in DAT interest, for a very simple reason : no DRM, no copyright issues, DAT tapes remain far more reliable than any hard-drive and are sure to be readable in ten or twenty years, whereas CD-R and, even worse, DVD-R, are of the rapidly damaged kind.