Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

The history of the “floppy disk” is an interesting one. This part of the history began in 1971 when IBM introduced to the world the first “memory disk,” or what was to be called later on, a “floppy disk.”  This first floppy was 8 inches in size and created out of a flexible plastic material. The disk surface had to be covered in magnetic iron oxide which would allow data to be written and read from by the computer. The name “floppy” developed naturally from the flexible structure of the disk itself. The floppy disk ushered in the first device that could contain data and be physically moved from one computer to another.

Alan Shugart was the engineer at IBM who came up with the floppy disk concept. His original intent with the floppy was to be able to move data from one location into another holding device. This larger storage device was a whopping 100 megabytes in size. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before other uses for the floppy emerged, and soon it became the premium medium for data storage.

The cassette tape in use at the time also used magnetic material to record data. The floppy used a similar idea on the structure was different being a circle of magnetic material instead of a moving stream of tape. The disk drive would attach itself to the center of the floppy and spin it like a record. The head of the drive could read and write data and resembled that of a tape deck head. It would make contact with the surface by permeating the envelope, or the hard plastic shell of the floppy, and could read and write to both sides of the diskette. The first floppy Shugart developed could only hold 100 KB of information.

Shugart refined his design in 1976 when he created the next level, the 5 1/4″ floppy diskette. He did this for Wang Laboratories who needed a smaller size floppy disk that could be used with their new desktop computers. The new 5 /14″ disks were in full manufacture by 1978 and could now hold 1.2 MB of information. Interestingly, the 5 1/4″ size came about during a discussion at a bar, where An Wang pointed to a napkin and suggested that the disk needed to be “about that size.”  The napkin she pointed at was 5 1/4″ in size.

Sony developed the first 3 1/2″ diskettes and drives in 1981. Instead of being actually floppy like their 5 1/4″ counterparts, these were encased in hard plastic. That, however, didn’t change the name as they too were referred to as “floppy disks.”  Their first storage capacity was only 400KB, but this later increased to 720KB and they were referred to as “double density.”  The last version was able to hold 1.44MB and was called the high density disk.