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A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) 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.
Drawings from IBM Floppy Disk Drive Patents. IBM's decision in the late 1960s to use semiconductor memory as the writeable control store for future systems and control units created a requirement for an inexpensive and reliable read only device and associated medium to store and ship the control store's microprogram and at system power on to load the microprogram into the control store.
The IBM Diskette General Information Manual (PDF). Product Reference Literature (Fifth ed.). IBM. August 1979. "RX02 8 inch Floppy Drive Information". David Gesswein "8 inch floppy disks". University of Amsterdam. Archived from the original on July 2, 2016
A floppy-disk controller (FDC) is a hardware component that directs and controls reading from and writing to a computer's floppy disk drive (FDD). It has evolved from a discrete set of components on one or more circuit boards to a special-purpose integrated circuit (IC or "chip") or a component thereof.
Floppy disk format and density refer to the logical and physical layout of data stored on a floppy disk. Since their introduction, there have been many popular and rare floppy disk types, densities, and formats used in computing, leading to much confusion over their differences.
The user cannot switch between programs. The software can only exist on its own floppy disk, not stored on a disk with multiple programs, such as a hard disk drive. The self-booting game or application cannot easily use computer hardware normally accessed through device drivers in the operating system. The program needs built-in support for ...
As a result, early floppy drives required jumpers to be set on the drive to tell it which controller commands it should receive. When introducing the PC, IBM sliced the cable between the first and second drive, and twisted seven of the conductors, effectively flipping the four conductors which specifically addressed the first or second drive.
The Disk System's Disk Cards are somewhat proprietary 71 mm × 76 mm (2.8 × 3 in) 56K-per-side double-sided floppy. They are a slight modification of Mitsumi's Quick Disk 71 mm 2.8 in square disk format which is used in a handful of Japanese computers and various synthesizer keyboards, along with a few word processors. QuickDisk drives are in ...