These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately starting in 1972 by Memorex and others. While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed, such as USB flash drives, memory cards, optical discs, and storage available through local computer networks and cloud storage. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks.įloppy disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continue to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into the 21st century. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare to non-existent. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. Subsequently the 5¼-inch and then the 3½-inch became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM, had a disk diameter of 8 inches (203.2 mm). Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive ( FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device. A 3½-inch floppy disk removed from its housingĪ floppy disk or floppy diskette (sometimes casually referred to as a floppy or diskette) 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.

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