Floppy History

Symon · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:22 pm

In 1971, an IBM team led by Alan Shugart invented the 8-inch floppy diskette. This floppy was an 8" plastic disk coated with magnetic iron oxide; data was written to and read from the disk's surface. The nickname "floppy" came from it's flexibility. The floppies were considered revolutionary devices at the time for its portability which provided a new and easy physical means of transporting data from one computer to another.
A floppy disk is a circle of magnetic material similar to any kind of recording tape; one or two sides of the disk are used for recording. The disk drive grabs the floppy by its center and spins it like a record inside its housing. The read/write head, much like the head on a tape deck, contacts the surface through an opening in the plastic shell, or envelope.