Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 มิ.ย. 2024
- I got sucked into researching the origins of the 3.5in floppy disk after looking into one of my recent HP drives. That sent me on a long quest to better understand the format and finding out some very interesting things I didn't even know existed!
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:43 Precursor History
2:05 3.5in Disk Creation
3:50 Why So Tall?
4:21 The ANSI Competition
7:23 Gaining Market Share
9:41 Who Was First to Use it?
12:27 WHO!?
15:23 The 3.5in Endures
16:28 Outro
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Phenomenal work on this one, Shelby! Props for following all the rabbits down their various rabbit holes and then seeking out that rare hardware to get to the bottom of the story. I love seeing commonly accepted tech history being expanded upon and corrected like this, especially with something as iconic as the 3.5" disk.
Thanks! This one had a *ton* of rabbit holes I even cut for the video! Like technically the "Computer Devices DOT" was the first PC compatible-ish computer with 3.5in drives! But it was fascinating to put all the pieces in place for this one and finally understand how it all played out.
And I cannot believe the right-place-right-time with the Jonos to actually get one and am really looking forward to shedding more light soon!
@@TechTangents And then there's this: The Apple LISA (!) used 3.5" floppies, just like its successor the Macintosh did.
@LGR The first 3,5 disk was developed by Marcell Jánosi at the Budapest Rádiótechnikai Gyár (BRG) in 1973. The disk and the associated BRG MCD-1 type drive received domestic patent protection in 1974. The BRG factory negotiated with Sony for a long time, but in the end Sony did not wait and meanwhile developed its own version. But Sony took over the basic idea from BRG.
@@ReggieArford Lisa used 5.25" "Twiggy" drives that use disks the same size as Shugart 5.25" drives but they're not compatible. Since Lisa was a sales flop, Apple revamped the computer as the Macintosh XL with 3.5" drives and the Macintosh System ported to it.
@@greggv8 Really? The two Lisas I own both have OEM 3.5" drives. The documentation I've got shows 3.5" drives. The documentation I've seen shows 3.5" drives. TH-cam videos I've seen all have 3.5' drives. Please cite your source(s).
The 3.5” disk will probably never be forgotten as it’s the universal save-icon in almost all programs.
smartphone and web apps don't have save icons anymore, they save automatically, so I'm not sure about that!
And they fly well when thrown ;)
Smart phones auto save and don’t use the Icon, sorry bud your a boomer
@@user-rm3qj5ex7e And what if he is? You're implying that it has some negative connotations like a sex offender or some Marxist.
@@the_kombinatorwow that took a strange turn.
I do think it's funny how it was developed by Sony, who originally defined it in metric as being 90 mm wide but we then called it 3.5" to fit in with the convention of 8" and 5.25" floppy drives lol.
Yeah, an actual 3.5" floppy wouldn't even be compatible... 🤣
Americans gonna American I guess...
On all the boxes of 3.5" floppies I saw where there was french text it was labelled as an 89mm floppy. 89mm is closer to 3.5" than 90mm so maybe it was actually designed as 3.5" to begin with?
I am always floored when I give people measurements in millimeters or centimeters in the US and get replies like "what's that in inches? I don't know metric". These are generally people over 40.
I worked at a printing company once, and we would measure things down to 16ths of inches. The spite Americans have for metric measurement knows no limits.
@@AGFuzzyPancake Unfortunately when Ronald Reagan killed our plans to fully switch to metric a lot of people dug in their heels. I'm 35 and was taught metric primarily in school but once I became an adult there was little sold here with metric measurements. Even tape measurers are not usually printed with metric and sae which is ridiculous. On the other hand I drive a Ford and every bolt on it is in metric.
Here in South Africa we called the 8 inch and 5.25 inch disks "Floppy" disks, because they were so flexible.
The 3.5 inch we called "Stiffies" because of the hardend plastic chassis.
I'm frankly disappointed this video isn't just a biography of me! But I all seriousness, awesome research!
At least you got a cameo! And thanks! It was a lot of work to make sure I really nailed the research on this one.
When I was a teenager in 1995, I was given a Compaq SLT/286. I took it apart and messed up the floppy drive which was a Citizen customized for that laptop. I bought a standard 34 pin TEAC drive to replace it but the cable had 20 pins. I spent the summer of 1995 going to the library to research the signals and bought a logic probe from RadioShack to reverse engineer the pins. Then I took the 20 pin ribbon cable and mapped it into a 34 pin receptacle.
Boot up floopy seek on a 3.5" is still one of my favorite childhood sounds. Thank you Sony, thank you TT.
And the dreaded seeking from 0 to 80 / head slamming on a bad disk still haunts me 😂. Or the slight incompatibility between mine and my friends, so it was🤞 to see if the shared documents survived the trip between us.
While the 5 inch diskette drive seek sound is a favorite from my youth (not childhood).
The most fascinating thing to me about your research is the relatively short window of time in which everything transpired. I got my first PC in 1993, and as a kid I thought 3.5in floppies were a recent innovation.
I got my first computer around the same time 93/94. I knew that 3.5in drives weren't that new, but I didn't think they were that old either. I was 11 and the 5.5in floppy was still very common in the older school computers. 3.5in discs were the undisputed standard that you knew any current system would be able to read. Where I went to school a lot of classrooms were just starting to replace the Apple IIs with IBM compatibles that had 3.5in drives.
1980s office computers used 8" floppy disks. Looked identical to 5.25" only larger. And they WERE floppy if you waved them like a sheet of paper.
@@dfirth224 Hard sectored
@@Staren01 My school got their first Apple IIs (I believe the IIe specifically) in 1989 yes very late to the party but public schools, my first home computer had both 5.25" and 3.5" which was a trend for me throughout the past 30 years I still like to try to have working disk drives since there's still a lot of old media out there that needs backing up, pity newer boards often ditch the FDC so I need to look into alternatives since PCIe slots are such a dang premium still.
Holy crap, that hardware reveal is gorgeous.
I must admit the 3741 at 1:09 was snazzy. I worked for IBM from '68 to '98... always in the field with the machines in our customer's businesses. I don't get very worked up when it comes to old iron. When you deal with all those generations of technology it is better not to linger on the past. It's better to embrace the changes and hold onto your hat. When I think back over those 30 years, I remember the people I worked with, the bugs I never fixed (usually software bugs) and the tough bugs I fixed that others couldn't. It wasn't about the hardware or software that was pretty but about trying to fix what was wrong with it.
Awaiting the Jonos video. Never heard of them before!
One rabbit hole I went down was to figure out the origin of the modern "half height" 3.5" floppy drive with integrated face plate.... aka the "standard" drives we all use today. Best I could pin it down, it was made by TEAC first in 1987. I think Epson was another contender here as well. Chinon came close, they were shipping the slightly taller drives with the Amiga 2000 in 1987. Keep in mind that IBM never originally sold drives in that style. The PS/2 had separate face plates (including the official 3.5" drives for the PC AT). Same goes with the early Amigas and the Atari ST. Apple had the fancy motorized eject drives and they never used face plates either, always preferring a molded slot in the computer's case.
Woah woah... what do you know about official 3.5" drives for the AT? I've been trying to figure out if one ever existed, or if it's just a slew of aftermarket products trying to fill the void?
@@nickwallette6201 Official IBM product. They used the 720k drives that were shipped in the PC Convertible with an adapter board. They offered kits for both the 5170 AT and earlier PC XT with matching face plates and fit a 5.25" half height drive bay.
@@NJRoadfan Huh! Man I would love to see that. All I've ever seen is retrofits with the typical 3.5-to-5.25" conversion plate.
In the 1980's, a hard drive more than doubled the price of a PC. It was common for computers to have dual disk drives, one for booting the computer up, and later holding the disk for the program being run, and the second one for holding your saved data. In the transition phase from 5.25" to 3.5", it was common to replace the B: drive with a 3.5" model, often with an adapter kit, that bridged the gap to allow it to fit in a half height 5.25" drive bay. When they started going into PC's, the drives had a Shugart data interface, but with a row of pins instead of the edge connectors that 5.25" and 8" drives used (there were, of course, adapters for this problem...). The IBM PC/XT/AT BIOS didn't really have a 3.5" option, which is another reason why the 3.5" drive was usually the B: drive (the only thing that you needed the BIOS for was booting the system-once it was booted, the operating system could bridge the gap once again). There was third-party software that you could run to tell the operating system the proper parameters for the B: drive to work properly and use the full capacity of the drive. Many IBM PC clones had 3.5" disk options in their BIOS, and shipped with a floppy controller that natively understood the 3.5" drives. The IBM PS/2 systems were the first IBM desktop systems designed for the 3.5" floppy.
Dig deeper about this Jonos company. There is a big chance to meet people which were working for the company. I love the stories from S100 era. It's like learning about first pioneers ;)
Awesome history video! I've read that the Amstrad CPC ended up using the 3 inch drives because they basically picked them up at a bargain after the Sony 3.5in disk won. Really hope the next video is about the Jonos!
I remember the Amstrad PCW 8256 and the Sinclair Spectrum +3 had them aswell, the disks where pretty durable too compared to the 3.5" disks.
I think Casio used them on a thing or two in the mid 80s as well in their foray into semi pro music gear. Although I always knew them as 2.8" QuikDisks?
The Sega SC-3000 computer, released in 1983, also used 3-inch disks via the SF-7000 expansion device.
@@imranahmad2733 i was writting a speccy +3 game and discovered that disks formatted on an amstrad pcw 8256 would read and write much faster on the speccy than those formatted on a speccy, i never discovered why, the project was cancelled.
Yep and also in the other Amstrad owned model the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K +3. I wonder if TT will do an episode about those 3" disks?
Very interesting video!
I remember my dad getting our first PC. It came originally shipped with two 5.25" floppy drives, but one of them was soon replaced with a DSDD 3.5" drive and later on with even a DSHD floppy drive.
Anyway, that PC was ultimately replaced by a new PC, a 486SX if I'm not mistaken and the PC was handed over to me. It continued to serve me well for a couple of years, until I replaced it with an AT from the same brand. By that time it not only had two floppy drives, but it had an "external" MFM/RLL (can't remember which) 20MB hard disk made by Olivetti, that would have fitted perfectly in one of the floppy drive slots, were it not for the fact that it had a tendency to get very hot. You could say that this was my very first adventure in PC modding ;-).
I still use 3.5" floppy drives on a regular basis. But it's not really on a PC (although I have a PC with an LS-120 drive for data transfer purposes). Instead it's on an MSX. That MSX is so maxed out that it has more RAM and more storage than my original PC ever did...
For a closer look at the 3.5 inch diskette's many innovative design features, see my video "The genius engineering of the 3½ inch floppy disk".
Fascinating and thank you for all your sleuthing. We started selling ACT Apricot Pcs in September 1983 which had single or double floppies in the base (non-HD) models. From memory they were Sony units and the smaller height versions. Clearly ACT had been talking to Sony for some time...
I thought this was well-documented history. Fascinating how stuff like this can become as exciting as some kind of crime drama ;D. It's like "WHO DUNNIT!? WHO MARKETED THE FIRST 3.5" FLOPPY DRIVE!?" . Crazy! Excellent video!
Very interesting and informative, you should rename it to "Origins of the Save Game Icon" though, it would give you a quadrillion views from all those youngsters that never held one of these :P
If you show one to such youngster, they ask if it is a 3d printed save icon 😂
The very earliest IBM PC JX computers (only sold in Australia, NZ and Japan) had 40 track 3.5" floppies. But that was because the controller didn't know how to half-step the disk head! The disks were actually 720k disks.
It's always interesting how so many things have been innovated by Sony that we don't tend to think about. As you mentioned, they were the ones who developed the 3.5" floppy, they also worked with Philips to develop the CD, they developed the Beta tape that lost to the VHS tape, they were even the ones that created the Blu-ray. These are just a few that come to mind that we don't often associate with them.
Most of the time Sony likes to have their products end to end proprietary, and completely under their control, and so certain formats that they created, even if superior failed. This isnt always the case, as in this product or blu-ray, but you rarely think about Betamax, MemoryStick, or Minidisc.
If only Sony wasn't so inclined into making things proprietary, they would have been even far more influential
@@Biomancer81 And the Elcaset!
VHS is somehow derived from Sony's U-Matic tape system, isn't it? At least that's what Sony claimed on their advertising at the time. The slogan was something along the lines of "Betamax: We created the competition and now we've bettered it". Please correct me if I'm wrong or the slogan is just a sign of Sony hubris! There certainly seems to be nothing Sony likes more than to create a proprietary format!
Having spent most of the 80's & early 90's manufacturing diskettes of all sizes this was a nice blast from the past.
It amazes me how many people back then and still today think that disk is a "hard disk" because of the hard case.
And today, most people think of that disc as the "save" button.
This is a great video. All the additional research has definitely paid off. Well done!
Good historical research work, Shelby! This was a wonderful watch.
Great job, guy. I was honestly expecting this to be some half-assed TH-cam documentary and I am glad I watched it to the end. Kudos to you on a job well done!
Amazing work, thanks for documenting all of this, enjoyed every second
Very well researched. From someone who lived through all those years and used cassette, 8", 5.25", 3.5" (as well as 'enterprise' 3420, 3480/3490, and many others) I do not believe I ever even heard of Jonos which was/is interesting. Their market must have been targeted differently than the two 'worlds' I straddled (data centers/ large business and home / soho). So thanks for the bringing that small piece of history to my attention. :)
Fascinating, and well researched! I dig this format, and I totally want to see more of that Jonos Courier. Nicely done!
Thank you for the video. I purchased an Atari 520ST in 1985 with a 3.5" floppy drive, Definitely a step up from the 5.25" of the Apple II and the Cassette Tape Drive of the TI-99/4A.
Great video. It's funny to me that the one that wasn't even floppy became the best known of all of the 'floppy' formats, so much so that it's still the default icon for 'Save' on computers 40 years after its introduction.
The disk itself is still floppy, as you can see at a few points in the video. It's the protective cassette that isn't floppy.
In contrast, a Hard Disk uses non-flexible platters instead of floppy media.
Great video. You really went in depth with your research. I really enjoyed this one.
Quite a bit more history to the origins than I realized. I grew up with the 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies. Everyone I knew called the 3.5 inch version the hard floppy disk. In school we used the 5.25 inch floppies to save our work. When I went to college they were still using the 5.25 inch floppy drives. By then I was using the 3.5 inch disks. So it made it possible to bring in my older 5.25 inch disks to backup the data to the newer standard. The iconic symbol for saving data to this day is still the 3.5 inch hard floppy disk.
Well done. Having lived through several decades of computer history I find it quite interesting to learn details that I had not heard about when it happened.
What I think is most impressive is that Sony can lay claim to the save icon, one of the few things to keep Keith Richards amused (alongside Twinkies and Cockroaches) after the end of days.
Fun fact for the unwary - the early 3.5" floppy media were designed and manufactured with a round-ended pill capsule shaped window in the metal shutter for the moving R/W heads to operate through to contact the magnetic surface, which was soon altered to the normal rectangular window most people would be familiar with. You can see both types of shutter window in your video.
The trap for the unwary, is that the head clearance in later 3.5" drives expects a rectangular window in the shutter, so if an old disk with the round-ended window is inserted in a later drive, the shutter will likely foul the heads and upon eject, damage them or even rip them out of the drive!
Very interesting and well researched video!
Thank you!
Superb research and a riveting presentation! Thanks 🙂
Looking forward to that Jonos video. Thanks for your super deep dive on this!
Omg .. I forgot I would see "cassette" printed on the box or media quite frequently... Along with diskette... The drive mechanism in my Tandy 1000HX with a single 3 1/2" drive was so solid and satisfying. Not to mention, totally reliable over all the years. Just, clunk, read, done. Great video, just started watching... 🍻🌎❤️🎶🕺🏻💾🖥️
Many manuals for NES, SNES etc... console games call the cartridge a cassette as well ... at least in the german translation
They were "disc cassettes" with a hard plastic enclosure for a fragile storage medium, much like a tape cassette.
A very interesting presentation. Thanks for posting.
I love it. Both informative and enthusiastic. As always thanks for the content!
Why am I not surprised to learn that, this now industry standard format was originally conceived by Sony, because they wanted their own product for a Full Stack...
Fascinating video, regardless!
Happy to see all those floppy disks you bought finally being shown off. Great video!
This is really fascinating. I find it interesting that even in early episodes of The Computer Chronicles they talk about the ongoing transition from 5.25 disks to 3.5 disks. Since the show started in 1981, it shouldn't be a surprise, but it's interesting nonetheless. Cool history piece. I am curious to hear more about this Jonos Computers some time. I think I will start doing some digging of my own into them to see what I can see.
Phenomenal research and awesome work!
Great video, as always!
Admirable research!
Hi Shelby. I just found your channel, and I'm very impressed. Watch much of the first disk imaging video and .. well .. wow. Cool! I've been doing computer stuff since 1971 and it's a joy to discover a place that is just a treasure trove of information. Thanks.
Nice video, well put together and then there were the 3-inch floppy disks I had used to these others in my childhood as well.
Great job on the thorough research.
That's a great one Shelby! Thanks to helping preserve computer history o/
I don't know how youtube kept this from me this long. You always talk about cool stuff Shelby!
Having used all three formats over the years thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Fantastic story, great work.
Great rundown, thanks!
Nice educational video! Well done. I enjoyed it
Wow-that was fascinating and very interesting-thank you!!
Fantastic video well researched and put together, I didn't know about the Jonos system and very much looking forward to that video.
Great research on this dead format. I knew Sony was a leader but never even heard of Jonos before this video. I have been buying, working on & fixing computers since the late '80s. I have seen formats come and go, however I do still have 3.5" floppies and CDs in my collection.
Brilliant research! I've enjoyed seeing you work on the Jonos computer on the livestreams, can't wait for a video on it.
Awesome video sir ... as usual!
Great video, well done!
What an AWESOME video, thanks for that, thanks for correcting the "common knowledge" of the HP being the first to use it. Now if we could get hold of someone from Jonos for an interview...
love the sound of those floppy drives when reading from/writing data to the disk...
What a great video! It has spread out a bright light onto a common device used by billions of people, without knowing it. The background history is fantastic. Thanks for sharing this.
My feed offered me a true crime doc I was interested in, and one of your videos.
Immediately clicked on you without hesitation.
Always fascinating to learn computer history from the rabbit trails you seem to find yourself on, haha. Excellent research done, can’t wait to see the Jonos!
Awesome to watch ! Thank you
I never expected a video about this topic but it was really interesting.
Amazing investigation. Love it !!!!
Fantastic video. Great research on an important topic with great delivery.
This kind of videos am AWSOME.
I LOV LOVE LOVE IT
I mean... Floppy disks are just Cassettes in a Circular, rather than Linear Format...
Great video on an obscure topic. Well done!
Very good and exceptional.
In Dutch, the name "diskette" stuck for these. And honestly, that makes a whole lot more sense than calling both the hard and the floppy ones floppy disks...
This is a really cool video. I think it would be cool to see a video going over every storage medium sony created as it feels like they have made a bunch.
Oh yah. Including audiovisual media too: U-matic videocassette, Betamax videocassette, Elcaset audio tape, Compact Disc (with Philips), 3½" floppy diskette, Betacam videocassette,* Video 8 (and later Hi-8) videocassette, Digital Audio Tape, MiniDisc, NT microcassette, PlayStation memory card, DV videocassette (with Panasonic and others), DVD (with multiple other companies), Memory Stick flash memory card, MicroMV videocassette...
Let me know if I missed any!
* smallest-size tapes are identical to Betamax, but the signal recorded on them is completely different
Great documentary! I'm going to rewatch it with my dad. Thank you so much!
I have a machine that takes manual shutter disks. The RCA MS2000, which i believe dates from late 1982, or early 1983.
First time here - those credits were amazing. I haven't heard that noise since I pulled an all-nighter in high-school to finish a report. I don't miss that printer one bit.
Just stellar, thanks for the history lesson ✨
This video and the amount of information in it IS OUTSTANDING! GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT!!!
VERY interesting well researched video! 🙂
I've got an old sharp word processor that uses a belt driven 3.5" floppy drive that uses 720k disks. The drive didn't work when I got it but I put a new belt on and it's working now.
Thank you! A very inspiring video!
Also explains how Amstrad got ahold of a bunch of 3inch drives for cheap enough to put in the CPC.
16:15 There were such a synonymous of small files that even to this day the save icon is a 3.5 in floppy
Great video.
Well done. 👍
Well done.
Thanks for more interesting, great content!
Once again... Great video
This is a very interesting video. Thank you so much for thinking of it and making it. 😃 I have 5,25 for my Commodore SX 64 and 3,5 for my IBM ThinkPads. But also the iomega clik! Pocket Zip for the ThinkPads. I enjoy that specific storage medium a lot 😃
Very interesting. Thanks. :)
I miss Byte magazine. Ending credits: the sweet sound of the dot-matrix impact printer.
Good job on the vid. I lived through the 3.5” era. Used 8” disks at work (we had IBM equipment).
Nice! The oldest 8" floppy drive I ever saw, had a cartridge in which you could lay the floppy, that is, without the hard plastic, and close the lid and insert it. I haven't seen that again even on youtube.
The way you describe it, I imagine it being very similar to the CD caddy that some old CD-ROM drives used.
I have an external apple scsi CD-ROM drive that loads a caddy instead of the slide out tray that was common on PC drives.
I have some questions tho: Did these early 8" disks come "naked" without the wobbly plastic shell ? or did the 8" always have that shell and you needed to get the disk out for THIS specific caddy loading drive?
And once you got the wobbly disk out of its soft plastic shell - which I imagine would damage that shell for good - how do you store it after use ? In a jewel case ?
Bravo!
I first got seriously interested in personal computers in 1980, with subscriptions to Creative Computing, Byte and Infoworld. I closely followed the attempts to introduce the 3.5" "floppy."
To my mind, it was the Macintosh that really settled the small disc standard.
My wife called these "cookies, " and many of my friends who had worked with 8" and 5.25" floppies referred to these as "firmies."
Mostly we all settled on the term "diskette."
Those 8" floppies were truly floppy. The 5.25" ones were less so.
I miss the diskettes.
I still have a bunch of Zip disks and drives in the garage.
Yeah, USB drives put an end to all of that, and software distributed on CD did as well.
I do credit the iMac for first popularizing USB. Also, the Mac made CDs easy.
I'm barely old enough to have used 8" floppies. At 16 I worked at the local railroad station, and one of the thing they had me do was to take a backup of the ticket machine, which used 8" floppies. At home I was, of course, using 5.25" floppies with my C64 bought in Germany 4 years earlier.
I have a boatload of 3.5" disks from days gone by. I have a USB external floppy drive as well as an internal drive on another PC. I also have a PC with two 3.5's that I used for duplicating copy protected disks. It has a Copy II PC hardware board. Surprisingly, disks that have been in cold storage for 20+ years still work. Just for giggles, I installed a late 90's copy of Quattro Pro Spreadsheet software from four 3.5's. It runs perfectly!
Awesome video!