Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far.
Exactly what it says on the tin.
The first time I used an 8 inch floppy disk was 1973-74, using a 3rd party drive on a DG Nova. The (1mb?) disk media was floppy, but encased in a hard plastic shell much like the later 3.5 inch disks. The first program I was asked to write for it (in assembly language, of course) was a utility that could recover damaged or deleted files, much like the later Norton Utilities. Oddly, I can’t find any record of this particular drive on the internet.
Very nice article! I keep a drawer with punched cards, paper tape and floppies of all sorts… and although my grasp of electronics (and analog data encoding) is quite vague, I always enjoy reading this kind of material.
I bought 2 floppy disks for my apple ][ in 1978, for a massive 2 * 115kb. A month later I learned it was possible to push a hole through the cover to use the other side, thus doubling the capacity.
Random access so convenient compared to my former cassette tape storage!
Surely, I thought then, this ≈ 460kb is all I’ll ever need.
Of course, a year later, I had over 200 floppy disks…