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8-inch floppy disk, inserted in drive, (3½-inch floppy diskette, in front, shown for scale) 3½-inch, high-density floppy diskettes with adhesive labels affixed The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter; [4] [5] they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and both drives and disks were then sold ...
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.
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.
drive: 1, diskette: 2 16 8 512 2× 64 kB 270 GCR (4/5) Internally based on FDU-250 Micro Floppy Disk Drive Unit [2] Thomson: 5 1 ⁄ 4 inch Single 1 40 16 128 80 kB 300 FM Thomson UD90.070 Double 2 256 320 kB MFM Thomson DD90-320 [NB 17] 3 1 ⁄ 2 inch Double 1 80 16 256 320 kB 300 MFM Thomson TO9, Thomson DD09-350 Double 2 640 kB
MS-DOS/PC DOS versions 4.0 and earlier assign letters to all of the floppy drives before considering hard drives, so a system with four floppy drives would call the first hard drive E:. Starting with DOS 5.0, the system ensures that drive C: is always a hard disk, even if the system has more than two physical floppy drives.
The Zip drive is a "superfloppy" disk drive that has all of the standard 3 + 1 ⁄ 2-inch floppy drive's convenience, but with much greater capacity options and with performance that is much improved over a standard floppy drive.
A Maxell-branded 3-inch Compact Floppy Disk. The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. [1] Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the 8-inch format that preceded them, many proprietary floppy disk formats were developed, either using a different disk design or special layout and ...
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.