Short notes on floppy disks with its size and capacity
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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".
Work on a drive that led to the world's first floppy disk and disk drive began in 1967 at a San Jose (CA) IBM facility,[1] and introduced into the market in an 8-inch format in 1972. The more conveniently sized 5 1⁄4-inch disks were introduced in 1976, and became almost universal on dedicated word processing systems and personal computers.This format was more slowly replaced by the 3 1⁄2-inch format, first introduced in 1982. There was a significant period where both were popular. A number of other variant sizes were introduced over time, with limited market success.
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.