Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Who invented the floppy disk?
Based upon a patent issued in 1952, Nakamatsu claims to have invented the first floppy disk[28] well before IBM's floppy disk patent was filed in 1969.[29] However, what Nakamatsu patented in 1952 was a paper for optical sound player.[13] In contrast to a floppy disk, this Nakamatsu patent discloses the use of printed paper for storage instead of the magnetic material of a floppy disk. It is not rewritable and lacks most elements of the IBM floppy disk patent. Since the paper was 'floppy' material, he claims he had invented the floppy disk (sometimes he uses the phrase "floppy media"); however, it should be noted that flexible magnetic recording media was well known prior to 1952, in tape and wire recording.
Sony introduced the 3½-inch floppy disk format, called the micro floppy disk. The first commercial micro floppy disk drive was the Sony OA-D30V, released in 1981. Sony's initial 3½-inch floppy disk format was dual-sided and held 875 KB of data storage.
Generally the term floppy disk persisted, even though later style floppy disks have a hard case around an internal floppy disk.
Floppy disks, initially as media and later in and sizes, were a ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s into the first years of the 21st century. By 2006 computers were rarely manufactured with installed floppy disk drives; -inch floppy disks can be used with an external USB floppy disk drive, but USB drives for -inch, 8-inch, and non-standard diskettes are rare to non-existent. These formats are usually handled by older equipment.
A floppy disk, also known as a floppy, diskette, or simply 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).
Disk swapping refers to the practice of inserting and removing, or swapping, floppy disks in a floppy disk drive-based computer system. In the early days of personal computers, before hard drives became commonplace, most fully outfitted computer systems had two floppy drives (addressed as A: and B: on CP/M and MS-DOS—other systems had different conventions). Disk drives were expensive, however, and having two was seen as a luxury by many computer users who had to make do with a single drive.
Disk formatting is usually done by a utility program supplied by the computer OS manufacturer; generally, it sets up a file storage directory system on the disk, and initializes its sectors and tracks. Areas of the disk unusable for storage due to flaws can be locked (marked as "bad sectors") so that the operating system does not attempt to use them. This was time consuming so many environments had quick formatting which skipped the error checking process. When floppy disks were often used, disks pre-formatted for popular computers were sold. The unformatted capacity of a floppy disk does not include the sector and track headings of a formatted disk; the difference in storage between them depends on the drive's application. Floppy disk drive and media manufacturers specify the unformatted capacity (for example, 2 MB for a standard -inch HD floppy). It is implied that this should not be exceeded, since doing so will most likely result in performance problems. DMF was introduced permitting 1.68 MB to fit onto an otherwise standard -inch disk; utilities then appeared allowing disks to be formatted as such.
A floppy disk is a data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible "floppy" magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. In 1971 while working at IBM, David L. Noble invented the 8-inch floppy disk. Floppy disks in 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch formats enjoyed many years as a popular and ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange, from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s.
The physical device DF0: shares the same floppy drive mechanics with PC0:, which is the CrossDOS virtual device capable of reading PC formatted floppy disks. When any PC formatted floppy disk is inserted into the floppy drive, then the DF0: floppy Amiga icon will change to indicate that the disk is unknown to the normal Amiga device, and it will show four question marks ???? as the standard "unknown" volume name, while the PC0: icon will appear revealing the name of the PC formatted disk. Any disk change with Amiga formatted disks will invert this behaviour.
USB flash drives are often used for storage, data back-up and transfer of computer files. Compared with floppy disks or CDs, they are smaller, faster, have significantly more capacity, and are more durable due to a lack of moving parts. Additionally, they are immune to electromagnetic interference (unlike floppy disks), and are unharmed by surface scratches (unlike CDs). Until about 2005, most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with floppy disk drives in addition to USB ports, but floppy disk drives became obsolete after widespread adoption of USB ports and the larger USB drive capacity compared to the 1.44 MB 3.5-inch floppy disk.
Another important invention on the Amiga platform was the ADF format for creating images of Amiga floppy disks, either standard AmigaDOS floppies or non-DOS ("NDOS") ones, for use in Amiga emulators, such as WinUAE. Amiga emulators and AmigaOS (with third-party software) can use these files as if they were virtual floppy disks. Unlimited virtual floppies could be created on modern Amigas, although WinUAE on a real PC can handle only four at a time, the maximum number of floppy drives that the Amiga hardware could have connected at any one time.
Nakamatsu claims IBM reached licensing agreements with him in the late 1970s.[3][30] He also claims to have licensed his floppy disk to IBM in 1979,[31] but that the details are "confidential".[6] An IBM spokesman, Mac Jeffery, confirmed that the company did license some of his patents, but claimed they were not for the floppy disk, which he claimed IBM invented on its own.[31] Another IBM spokesman, Brian Doyle, said they licensed 14 patents from Nakamatsu, but also claimed that they do not have anything to do with the floppy disk.[32]
There are two variants of ARMD, ARMD-FDD and ARMD-HDD. Originally ARMD caused the devices to appear as a sort of very large floppy drive, either the primary floppy drive device 00h or the secondary device 01h. Some operating systems required code changes to support floppy disks with capacities far larger than any standard floppy disk drive. Also, standard-floppy disk drive emulation proved to be unsuitable for certain high-capacity floppy disk drives such as Iomega Zip drives. Later the ARMD-HDD, ARMD-"Hard disk device", variant was developed to address these issues. Under ARMD-HDD, an ARMD device appears to the BIOS and the operating system as a hard drive.
Early Vector Graphic models used the Micropolis floppy disk controller and Micropolis floppy disk drives. Later models were designed with the integrated floppy drive-hard drive controller and used Tandon floppy drives. Almost all used unusual 100-track per inch 5 ¼-inch floppy drives and 16-sector hard sector media. Some models included 8-inch floppy drives and hard disk drives.
A single floppy-disk controller (FDC) board can support up to four floppy disk drives. The controller is linked to the system bus of the computer and appears as a set of I/O ports to the CPU. It is often also connected to a channel of the DMA controller. On the x86 PC the floppy controller uses IRQ 6, on other systems other interrupt schemes may be used. The floppy disk controller usually performs data transmission in direct memory access (DMA) mode.
For the Apple II floppy drive, Steve Wozniak invented a floppy controller which (along with the Disk II drive itself) imposed two constraints:
Floppy disks remained a popular medium for nearly 40 years, but their use was declining by the mid-1990s. The introduction of high speed computer networking and new formats like the USB thumbdrive led to the eventual disappearance of the floppy disk as a standard feature of microcomputers, with a notable point in this conversion being the introduction of the floppy-less iMac in 1998. After 2000, floppy disks were increasingly rare and used primarily with older hardware and especially with legacy industrial computer equipment.
Reading the "first sector" of a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM is not a simply defined operation like it is on a floppy disk or a hard disk. Furthermore, the complexity of the medium makes it difficult to write a useful boot program in one sector, even though optical media sectors are typically 2048 bytes each, four times the standard 512-byte size of floppy and legacy hard disk sectors. Therefore, optical media booting uses the El Torito standard, which specifies a way for an optical disk to contain an image of a high-density (1.44 MB) floppy disk and for the drive to provide access to this disk image in a simple manner that emulates floppy disk drive operations. Therefore, CD-ROM drives boot as emulated floppy disk drives; the bootable virtual floppy disk can contain software that provides access to the optical medium in its native format.
Floppy disks became commonplace during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups. Before hard disks became affordable to the general population, floppy disks were often used to store a computer's operating system (OS). Most home computers from that period have an elementary OS and BASIC stored in ROM, with the option of loading a more advanced operating system from a floppy disk.
IBM Direct Access Storage Product Manager, Alan Shugart, assigned the job to David L. Noble, who tried to develop a new-style tape for the purpose, but without success. The project was reassigned to Donald L. Wartner, 23FD Disk Drive manager, and Herbert E. Thompson, 23FD Disk manager, along with design engineers Warren L. Dalziel, Jay Brent Nilson, and Ralph Flores; and that team developed the IBM 23FD Floppy Disk Drive System (code name Minnow). The disk is a read-only, flexible diskette called the "memory disk" and holding 80 kilobytes of data. Initially the disk was bare, but dirt became a serious problem so they enclosed it in a plastic envelope lined with fabric that would remove dust particles. The Floppy Disk Patent #3,668,658 was issued on June 6, 1972 with named inventors Ralph Flores and Herbert E. Thompson. The Floppy Disk Drive Patent #3,678,481 was issued July 18, 1972 with named inventors Warren L. Dalziel, Jay. B. Nilson, and Donald L. Wartner. IBM introduced the diskette commercially in 1971.
Floppy disk format and density refer to the logical and physical layout of data stored on a floppy disk. Since their introduction, there have been many popular and rare floppy disk types, densities, and formats used in computing, leading to much confusion over their differences. In the early 2000s, most floppy disk types and formats became obsolete, leaving the -inch disk, using an IBM PC compatible format of 1440 KB, as the only remaining popular format.
The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 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 IBM announced its first media as the "Type 1 Diskette" in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium encased in a rectangular plastic carrier. It is read and written using a floppy disk drive (FDD). Floppy disks were an almost universal data format from the late 1970s into the 1990s, used at first as a primary data storage mechanism, and later mostly as a file transfer system as part of what became known as "sneakernet".
Consider a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk. Low-level formatting of the floppy disk, normally writes 18 sectors of 512 bytes to each of 160 tracks (80 on each side) of the floppy disk, providing 1,474,560 bytes of storage on the disk.
Floppy disks are used for emergency boots in aging systems lacking support for other bootable media and for BIOS updates, since most BIOS and firmware programs can still be executed from bootable floppy disks. If BIOS updates fail or become corrupt, floppy drives can sometimes be used to perform a recovery. The music and theatre industries still use equipment requiring standard floppy disks (e.g. synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, and lighting consoles). Industrial automation equipment such as programmable machinery and industrial robots may not have a USB interface; data and programs are then loaded from disks, damageable in industrial environments. This equipment may not be replaced due to cost or requirement for continuous availability; existing software emulation and virtualization do not solve this problem because a customized operating system is used that has no drivers for USB devices. Hardware floppy disk emulators can be made to interface floppy-disk controllers to a USB port that can be used for flash drives.