Monday, September 13, 2010

8" Floppy Disks

Have you seen 8 inch Floppy disks?? Well whether you have heard about them or not they were the original "memory sticks." A floppy disk is a thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage in a square or rectangular plastic case. A floppy disk is a data storage device that was introduced by IBM in 1971. David L. Noble and his team developed a read only, 8-inch-diameter flexible disk, which could hold 80 kilobytes. IBM first started developing them in 1967 and it was developing for a more simple and inexpensive system for loading microcode. Microcode is coded instructions that are stored permanently in read-only memory. It cost customers around $5. Floppy disks were read and written by a floppy disk drive. But in 1976 the 5 1/4 Floppy was introduced and the 8 inch Floppy disk was quickly replaced. The 5 1/4 floppy could hold 110 kilobytes and were cheaper to buy.

1 comment:

  1. Whoa! A whole $5.00?? I wonder what that would amount to today - probably about twenty bucks or so? Umm...in 1967 I wasn't born, so I don't really know. :)

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