Invention of the Floppy Disc
Many of today's computers no longer come equipped with a floppy disk drive, but there was a time, soon after computers became household commodities, when floppy disks were a main form of data storage.
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Invention
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The earliest floppy disk was created in the early 1970s by the International Business Machines Company, otherwise known as IBM. David L. Noble, who joined the company in 1956, was responsible for developing the new storage device, which went by the codename Minnow before shipping to customers in 1971 as the 23FD read-only diskette.
Development
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The first read-write floppy disk was created in 1972 by Memorex called the Memorex 650. In 1973, IBM released its own read-write disk known as the Igar or IBM 33FD or IBM Type 1 Diskette, which had a greater storage capacity than the 650, coming in at 3.1 unformatted Mbits.
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Characteristics
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Floppy disks can be 8 inches, 5.25 inches, 4 inches, 3.5 inches or 2 inches in size. The plastic disks have a hole in the center and a small notch on the right side that marks a writable disk. Disks without notches are read-only disks and new information cannot be stored on them.
Capacity
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Floppies, as they are also known, such as the 3.5-inch floppy typically hold 2 megabytes (MB) of information. However, different sizes and brands of disks hold various amounts of information, from 1 MB to 32 MB.
Usability problems
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The disks are sensitive to heat and dust, despite their plastic covering. They are also susceptible to being ruined by magnetic fields as they contain magnets.
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References
- Photo Credit floppy disk image by Aleksandr Ugorenkov from Fotolia.com
