![]() ![]() ![]() Inside the package of a floppy disk is a circular piece of magnetically coated material with a hole in the middle, and a piece of protective fabric on either side of this material to protect it. There are eight bits in a byte, 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte, 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte and so on. As you probably know, all computer data can be broken down to simple on-off switches called bits at its most basic level – if the switch is off, it’s a zero, if it’s on, it’s a 1. Magnets, how do they work?įloppy disks work on the basic principle of magnetic binary storage. In 1973 it became commercially available with read/write abilities, and a larger capacity of 248KB. In 1971, IBM’s first read-only Type 1 diskette’ was an attempt to solve these problems in a neat 8in package, capable of storing 81KB. We’d used punch cards, punched tape and magnetic tape, which worked, but were laughably awful in terms of reliability, convenience, space and the length of time taken to load and save data. The floppy disk was one of the ‘first solutions to the problem of transferring data from one place to another. It holds a formatted capacity of just248KB. ![]() ![]() You can put a 50p piece in the central spindle hole with space to spare. But the history of the floppy disk goes back even further than the first PCs For the purpose of this feature, I got hold of one of the very first types of floppy disk, an 8in single-sided single-density disk. All the major models, from the IBM PC to the Amstrad PC1512 and PC1640, had one or two 5.25in floppy drives instead.įloppy disks were the main form of storage for the first decade of the PC’s history, in many cases the only form of storage. We had to send it back to get the version with 3.5in disks, which took ages because, at the time, hardly anybody used 3.5in disks for PCs. I opened the box, and inside it were two 5.25in disks. My first experience of multiple types of floppy disk came when my dad bought me a game (Targhan, in case you’re interested) for our PC XT clone in 1988. ![]()
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