Floppy Disk

A floppy disk, also called a floppy, diskette or just disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).

Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch (200 mm) media and later in 5¼-inch (133 mm) and 3½-inch (90 mm) sizes, were a ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s into the late 2000s.

Work on what became the world's first floppy disk drive began in 1967 at a San Jose (CA) IBM facility.The project was code-named "Minnow" and, once completed, it was "a read-only drive that loaded factory-written microcode" (instructions) and "software updates into mainframe computers." The storage media was an 8 inch diskette holding 80K bytes of data.

By 2007, computers were rarely manufactured with installed floppy disk drives; 3½-inch floppy disks can be used with an external USB floppy disk drive, but USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and non-standard diskettes are rare to non-existent. These formats are usually handled by older equipment.

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floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, flash storage cards, portable external hard disk drives, optical discs, ROM cartridges and storage available through computer networks.

The first floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, are 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately beginning in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970, and although in 1973 IBM announced its first media as "Type 1 Diskette" the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".

...
Wikipedia