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When was the floppy disk invented?

Dave, kind of a basic question, but when was the floppy disk invented, and how big was the first floppy disk, both in terms of size and storage capacity?

Dave's Answer:

What a fun question! I can remember in 1980 using these behemoth 8" floppy disks on a Terak microcomputer, learning PDP-11 assembly language while in college. Ah, but that dates me a bit, doesn't it? :-)

I dug around for this one and found some interesting information. According to floppy drive repair company Accurite, floppy disks were introduced by IBM in the early 1970's to allow service engineers to update the microcode on a mainframe or even run diagnostics. These first disks were 8-inches across and held a whopping 100KB on the unit. In 1973 a new, improved read-write floppy was introduced that held 250KB of information, quite a jump.

The first 5.25-inch floppy was introduced by Shugart Associates in 1976, in cooperation with Dysan Corp. Each only stored 100KB and were single-sided. Much churning of disk formats and data density later, and the standard 1.2MB diskette was born and was prominently featured on the IBM AT personal computer.

The smaller 3.5 inch floppy drive that you now see on PCs was introduced by Sony in 1980, and today's standard 3.5-inch floppy drives have a storage capacity of 1.5MB, while using the same basic technology introduced in the two-sided 8-inch floppy all those years ago.

Accurite has an excellent page on floppy disk drives, if you want to travel further into the past, the history of computer technology. Me? I'll just use my DVD-RW to burn, and re-burn, 4.7GB at a time. Floppy disks are just too darn small...

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Comments

Dave,
How funny! I remember 8" floppies and learning PDP-11 assembly code in college, too!

I also remember memorizing the sequence of switches that needed pressing to boot the PDP-11 where I started working in 1981. And that when our target machines for directory assistance went from 1/2 to a full 1 Meg of memory in 1982 it was a big deal!

Seems so quaint now, doesn't it?

Peggy

Posted by: Peggy at January 25, 2005 6:24 PM

About 1973 I had a job wire-wrapping boards for a PDP-11 at Cornell Chemical Reasearch labs. I don't recall the floppys of the day, but I distinctly remember that my son, then 3 or 4 years old, would bring dandelions to the PDP-11 and put them between the toggle switches (before being put to bed under one of the tables). It was so sweet. And oddly enough, he grew up to be a major antivirus programmer, living in California. Oh, what memories!

Susan.

Posted by: Susan Schweers at January 26, 2005 10:53 AM

I am almost certain that Alan Shugart invented the floppy before 1970 while working at IBM. IBM didn't give him much help in enhancing the technology at any great speed. The fastest development came later, from others like Tandon (can't remember how to spell Jogi's last name). Xerox wanted a cash cow and refused to do research, thus driving Shugart Associates into the ground while Alan created Seagate. Not all of the stories are pretty. I have in my junk box 2 working 3 1/2 inch floppy drives whose capacity is 360k; I think you can still specify 360k in MSDOS when you format a 3 1/2 inch floppy. Thus you can communicate with some rather old forgotten machines.

TH.

Posted by: TERRY at January 26, 2005 5:19 PM

Can't really comment on when the floppy was actually invented but I think the Apple II was one of, if not the, first personal computers to have one. Ditto for the 3.5" drives. BTW, I still have an Apple II with dual 5.25" drives and (gasp!) dual 8" drives. The 8" enclosure is significantly larger than the Apple. Not curtently in use but it will boot from either size.

Posted by: David Grant at January 26, 2005 6:21 PM

Hey, hey, hey! Let's not forget the place of mag cards in this progression. The precursor to the floppy wherein the media was stationary while the r/w head moved. Shaped and sized to simulate a punchcard, those babies were state-of-the-art, ca. 1969.

Posted by: Rambo Tribble at January 26, 2005 10:12 PM

Okay, I knew it would come to this. I can remember when I was in high school visiting my Dad's office and being wowed by the mag tapes and thrilled when they'd give me 'scrap' paper tape to take home. Paper tape... imagine how many miles of paper tape would be required to encode even this single Web page...

Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 27, 2005 3:03 AM

Terry is pretty much on track.
Interesting the Apple II comment - this machine
wasn't even a gleam in the eye of Stephen Job when 5.25" drives were being used in the Tandy TRS80 Model 1 Expansion Interface.
That PC(!) featured up to two 5.25" single sided single density drives with 35 tracks in 1977 (about 130kB each).

Posted by: aarc240 at March 7, 2005 6:52 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!