Floppy Disks - A Short History

Those born after the year 2000 probably never had to use a floppy disk with their computer.  A CD-ROM? Most definitely, but floppy disks are from an era of computing when users were not storing digital photos & music.  Floppy disks are from a time when video games and programs were less than a megabyte.  If they were larger, usually not by much, two or three floppy disks were utilized.

I remember the 8 inch floppy disk.  You need two hands to get them in and out of a disk drive.  You probably seen them in the film WarGames.  My mother used them throughout the 1980s at the hospital she worked at in Queens, New York.  IBM introduced the 8 inch floppy in 1971.  If I'm not mistaken, those disks only held 80 kilobytes of data.  

In the late 1970s, the 5.25 inch disk became popular.  Not only were they smaller in size, but they held more data; anywhere between 110 to 140 kilobytes.  Over the next several years, double density disks and double-sided drives would hit the market which resulted in the increase of data storage on this disk to about 360 kilobytes.

Before the industry settled on an even smaller floppy disk, they experimented with different ideas.  Apple worked on a proprietary disk called FileWare better known as "Twiggy."  Dysan worked on a 3.25 inch floppy that I know was being considered by Coleco for their ADAM computer.  A prototype drive was developed for it which you can read about here.  Mitsumi worked on various smaller sizes, but Sony eventually created the 3.5 inch disk that became industry standard in 1982.

These disks were called floppy disk, but they didn't... flop.  In other words, they were rigid and did not bend.  Early versions of these disks held 400 kilobytes of data, but eventually the capacity would increase to 1,474,560 bytes or "1.44 MB" as it was usually advertised.  By today's standards, that could hold a couple of high quality photos, maybe a short, low quality song, or several text documents.  With hard drives increasing in storage capacity and the industry moving more & more to the cloud, it's no wonder floppy disks have become extinct. 

On a side note, here's a Public Service Announcement about floppy disks...