Drawings from IBM Floppy Disk Drive Patents

The CF has a harder casing than a 3½-inch floppy; the metal door is opened by a sliding plastic tab on the right side.

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Less than 4 inches

A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible ("floppy") magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. more...

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Background

Floppy disks, also known as floppies or diskettes (where the suffix -ette means little one) were ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s, being used on home and personal computer ("PC") platforms such as the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga, and IBM PC to distribute software, transfer data between computers, and create small backups. Before the popularization of the hard drive for PCs, floppy disks were typically used to store a computer's operating system (OS), application software, and other data. Many home computers had their primary OS kernels stored permanently in on-board ROM chips, but stored the disk operating system on a floppy, whether it be a proprietary system, CP/M, or, later, DOS. Since the floppy drive was the primary means of storing programs, it was typically designated as the 'A:' drive. The second floppy drive was the 'B:' drive. And those with the luxury of a hard drive were designated the 'C:' drive, a convention that remains with us today long after the decline of the floppy disk's utility.

By the early 1990s, the increasing size of software meant that many programs were distributed on sets of floppies. Toward the end of the 1990s, software distribution gradually switched to CD-ROM, and higher-density backup formats were introduced (e.g. the Iomega Zip disk). With the arrival of mass Internet access, cheap Ethernet and USB flash drives, the floppy was no longer necessary for data transfer either, and the floppy disk was essentially superseded. Mass backups were now made to high capacity tape drives such as DAT or streamers, or written to CDs or DVDs. One financially unsuccessful attempt in the late 1990s to continue the floppy was the SuperDisk (LS-120), with a capacity of 120 MB (actually 120.375 MiB), while the drive was backward compatible with standard 3½-inch floppies.

For some time, manufacturers were reluctant to remove the floppy drive from their PCs, for backward compatibility, and because many companies' IT departments appreciated a built-in file transfer mechanism that always worked and required no device driver to operate properly. However, manufacturers and retailers have progressively reduced the availability of computers fitted with floppy drives and of the disks themselves.