Floptical

The original Floptical technology was announced in 1988[1][2][3] and introduced late in 1991[citation needed] by Insite Peripherals, a venture funded company set up by Jim Adkisson, one of the key engineers behind the original 5+1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive development at Shugart Associates in 1976.

The technology involves reading and writing data magnetically, while optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disk being sensed by an infrared LED and sensor (a form of visual servo).

Insite licensed the floptical technology to a number of companies, including Matsushita, Iomega, Maxell/Hitachi and others.

A number of these companies later formed the Floptical Technology Association, or FTA, to try to have the format adopted as a replacement of standard floppy disks.

[6] However, this did not take place, and while Flopticals were installed in many Amiga systems, they were sold by either Insite, TTR Development or Digital Micronics (DMI), and not bundled by Commodore.

The LS-120 stored 120 MB of data while retaining the ability to work with normal 3+1⁄2-inch disks, interfacing as a standard floppy for better compatibility.

The FORMAT command in Windows XP and newer lacks support of the Floptical drive.