History of the floppy disk
The more conveniently sized 5¼-inch disks were introduced in 1976, and became almost universal on dedicated word processing systems and personal computers.
[4] After 2000, floppy disks were increasingly rare and used primarily with older hardware, especially with legacy industrial and musical equipment.
[7]: 513 IBM San Jose's Direct Access Storage Product Manager, Alan Shugart, assigned the job to David L. Noble,[7]: 513–523 who tried to develop a new-style tape for the purpose, but without success.
Initially the disk was bare, but dirt became a serious problem so they enclosed it in a plastic envelope lined with fabric that would remove dust particles.
[8] The Floppy Disk Patent #3,668,658[9] was issued on June 6, 1972, with named inventors Ralph Flores and Herbert E. Thompson.
The Floppy Disk Drive Patent #3,678,481[10] was issued July 18, 1972 with named inventors Warren L. Dalziel, Jay.
Internally IBM used another device, code named Mackerel, to write floppy disks for distribution to the field.
Drives supporting this format were offered by a number of manufacturers and soon became common for moving smaller amounts of data.
In 1976, media supplier Information Terminals Corporation enhanced resilience further by adding a Teflon coating to the magnetic disk itself.
[18] When the first microcomputers were being developed in the 1970s, the 8-inch floppy found a place on them as one of the few "high speed, mass storage" devices that were even remotely affordable to the target market (individuals and small businesses).
However, the drives were still expensive, typically costing more than the computer they were attached to in early days, so most machines of the era used cassette tape instead.
According to Massaro, Adkisson proposed a smaller size and began working with cardboard mockups before the Wang meeting.
Shugart's initial 5.25" drive was the 35-track, single-sided SA-400, which was widely used in many early microcomputers, and which introduced the 34-pin interface that would become an industry standard.
At one point, Shugart was producing 4,000 drives a day, but their ascendancy was short-lived; the company's fortunes declined in the early 1980s.
Commodore also elected to use GCR recording (although a different variation not compatible with Apple's format) in their disk drive line.
[26][27][28] Although hard sectored disks were used on some early 8" drives prior to the IBM 33FD (May 1973), they were never widely used in 5¼-inch form, although North Star clung to the format until they went bankrupt in 1984.
By the early 1980s, falling prices of computer hardware and technological advances led to the near-universal adoption of soft sector, double density disk formats.
Since these machines had no hard drive, the OS was usually booted from one floppy disk, which was then removed and replaced by another one containing the application.
In order to format or write to this high-coercivity media, the high-density drive switched its heads into a mode using a stronger magnetic field.
The main community of users was primarily those who still owned 1980s legacy machines (PCs running DOS or home computers) that had no 3½-inch drive; the advent of Windows 95 (not even sold in stores in a 5¼-inch version; a coupon had to be obtained and mailed in) and subsequent phaseout of stand-alone MS-DOS with version 6.22 forced many of them to upgrade their hardware.
The drive was also present in prototypes of the original Apple Macintosh computer, but was removed in both the Mac and later versions of the Lisa in favor of the 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk from Sony.
They all shared a number of advantages over the older format, including a small form factor and a rigid case with a slideable write protect catch.
Similarly, only three manufacturers of media (Maxell, Matsushita and Tatung) are known (sometimes also branded Yamaha, Amsoft, Panasonic, Schneider, Tandy, Godexco and Dixons), but "no-name" disks with questionable quality have been seen in circulation.
The single-sided double density (180 KB) drive was "inherited" by the ZX Spectrum +3 computer after Amstrad bought the rights from Sinclair.
The Smith Corona disks are confusingly labeled "DataDisk 2.8-inch", presumably referring to the size of the medium inside the hard plastic case.
In May 1982 the Microfloppy Industry Committee (MIC) was formed, eventually growing to a consortium of 23 system, drive and media manufacturers.
The irregular, rectangular shape had the additional merit that it made it impossible to insert the disk sideways by mistake as had indeed been possible with earlier formats.
IBM PC compatibles adopted it too, while the Amiga used MFM encoding on the same disks to give a capacity of 1 MB (880 KB available once formatted).
Another advance in the oxide coatings allowed for a new "extra-high density" ("ED") format at 2880 KB introduced in 1990 on the NeXTcube, NeXTstation and IBM PS/2 model 57.
A new, compact floppy disk, with dimensions of 80 × 100 × 5 millimeters (about 3 × 4 inches), has been jointly announced by Maxell, Hitachi, and Matsushita.
