With floppy drives and of the disks themselves.Įxternal USB-based floppy disk drives are available for computers without floppy drives, and they work on any machine that supports USBįloppy disk sizes are almost universally referred to in imperial measurements, even in countries where metric is the standard, and even when the size is in fact defined in metric (for instance the 3½-inch floppy, which is actuallyĩ0 mm). However, manufacturers and retailers have progressively reduced the availability of computers fitted One financially unsuccessful attempt in the late 1990s to continue the floppy was the SuperDisk (LS-120), with a capacity of 120 MB (actually 120.375 MiB ), while the drive was backward compatible with standard 3½-inch floppies.įor some time, manufacturers were reluctant to remove the floppy drive from their PCs, for backward compatibility, andīecause many companies' IT departments appreciated a built-in file transfer mechanism that always worked and required no device driver to operate properly. Were now made to high capacity tape drives such as DAT or streamers, or written to CDs or DVDs. Finally, with the arrival of mass broadband Internet access, cheap Ethernet and USB flash drives, the floppy was no longer necessary for data transfer either, and the floppy disk was essentially superseded. Also higher-density backup formats were introduced (e.g.
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Toward the end of the 1990s, software distribution gradually switched to CD-ROM for larger packages and online distribution for smaller programs. It was not unheard of for a large package like Adobe Photoshop to come on upwards of a dozen disks. This is true particularly on low-end systems - an early disk drive would haveĬost more than the computer itself hence manufacturers did not plan for their widespread use.īy the early 1990s, the increasing size of software meant that many programs were distributed on sets of multiple floppies. Storage method), printers, modems, and so on. Some systems such as the Commodore 64 did not follow this convention, and instead labeled the floppyĭrives starting at device 8, since these computers had already designated other device numbers to cassette drives (the default Those users with the luxury of a hard drive typicallyĭesignated it as the 'C:' drive, a convention that remains with Windows-based computers today, long after the decline of theįloppy disk's utility. The second floppy drive was the 'B:' or 'df1:' drive, and so on. Since the floppy drive was the primary means of storing programs, it was typically designated as the 'A:' drive or 'df0:'ĭrive. Some computers had "smart" drives that contained their own CPUs and could allow the computer to multiprocess (for example,Īllowing the computer to run a spreadsheet calculation while the disk drive copied an entire disk by itself). Many home computers had their primary OS kernels stored permanently in on-board ROM chips, but stored the disk operating system on a floppy, whether it be a proprietary system, CP/M, or, later, DOS.
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One), were ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s, being used on home and personal computer ("PC") platforms such as the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga, and IBM PC to distribute software, transfer data between computers, and create small backups.īefore the popularization of the hard drive for PCs, floppy disks were typically used to store a computer's operating system (OS), application software, and other data.
3.2 The 5¼-inch minifloppy (5.25-inch floppy).
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