page_title: Floppy disk
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Floppy disk / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Qume 8 inch Floppy Disk Drive. Announced October 1978. Michalopoulos, D. A.&#32;(1978-12).&#32;"New Products". Computer&#32;11&#32;(12): 81. A new dual-sided, double-density diskette drive reduces media wear to far below industry norms, according to Qume Corporation. The company has obtained an exclusive right to manufacture the drive for the North American and European markets from Y. E. Data, Japan's leading supplier of floppy disk drives. [Six paragraphs of press release omitted.] The DataTrak 8 stores 1.6M bytes of unformatted data and 1.2M bytes of IBM-formatted data. Track-to-track access time is three msecs, average access time is 91 msecs, and settling time is 15 msecs. The drive's data transfer rate is 500K bits per second. Standard options include file protection, programmable door lock, and activity light. The drive is compatible with all existing drives, including IBM. The DataTrack 8 is immediately available and is priced at $755 in OEM quantities of 1-24. Qume (April 1979), "Memory Products, DataTrak 8, Products Specifications", Qume Manual [1] Power Requirements 115 VAC 0.8A Max 24 VDC 1.0A Max 5 VDC 1.3A Max Power Dissipation 55 watts Mechanical Height 117 mm (4.55 inch) Width 217 mm (8.55 inch) Depth 370 mm (14.57 inch) Weight 6 kg (13 lbs.) Photo by Michael Holley, July 2007 Taken with a Canon PowerShot A630 (1/5 second and f/8) under tungsten lighting. The image was touched up with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0.
context_page_description: A floppy disk or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. Floppy disks are read from and written to by a floppy disk drive.
  The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM, had a disk diameter of 8 inches. Subsequently 5 ¹⁄₄-inch and then ​3 ¹⁄₂ inch became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. By 2006, computers were rarely manufactured with installed floppy disk drives; ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch, 8-inch, and non-standard floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks.
  Floppy disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continued to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into the 21st century, which is often cited as an example of skeuomorphism in user interface design.
context_section_description: The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately beginning in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970, and although IBM announced its first media as the "Type 1 Diskette" in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".
  In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch FDD. By 1978, there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM, M²FM and GCR. The ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB, for the DSDD (Double-Sided Double-Density) format using MFM encoding. In 1984, IBM introduced with its PC-AT model the 1.2 MB dual-sided ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch floppy disk, but it never became very popular. IBM started using the 720 KB double-density ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and the 1.44 MB high-density version with the PS/2 line in 1987. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988, IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB "DSED" (Double-Sided Extended-Density) diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models, but this was a commercial failure.
  Throughout the early 1980s, limitations of the ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be more practical than the 8-inch format, it was itself too large; as the quality of recording media grew, data could be stored in a smaller area. A number of solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, ​2 ¹⁄₂-, 3-, ​3 ¹⁄₄-, ​3 ¹⁄₂- and 4-inches (and Sony's 90.0 mm × 94.0 mm disk) offered by various companies. They all shared a number of advantages over the old format, including a rigid case with a sliding metal (or, later, sometimes plastic) shutter over the head slot, which helped protect the delicate magnetic medium from dust and damage, and a sliding write protection tab, which was far more convenient than the adhesive tabs used with earlier disks. The large market share of the well-established ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch format made it difficult for these diverse mutually-incompatible new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted; by 1988, the ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch was outselling the ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch.
  Generally, the term floppy disk persisted, even though later style floppy disks have a rigid case around an internal floppy disk.
  By the end of the 1980s, ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch disks had been superseded by ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch disks. During this time, PCs frequently came equipped with drives of both sizes. By the mid-1990s, ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. The advantages of the ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk were its higher capacity, its smaller physical size, and its rigid case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks. If a person touches the exposed disk surface of a ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch disk through the drive hole, fingerprints may foul the disk—and later the disk drive head if the disk is subsequently loaded into a drive—and it is also easily possible to damage a disk of this type by folding or creasing it, usually rendering it at least partly unreadable. However, largely due to its simpler construction (with no metal parts) the ​5 ¹⁄₄-inch disk unit price was lower throughout its history, usually in the range of a third to a half that of a ​3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk.
caption: An 8-inch disk drive with diskette
  (​3 1⁄2-inch disk in front, shown for scale)
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