The Floppy Disk Originated at IBM by Alan Shugart and His Team Back in 1967
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The floppy disk originated at IBM by Alan Shugart and his team back in 1967. Shugart later founded the Shugart Associates in 1973i which dominated the 8-inch floppy disk drive market in the late 1070s. After resigning as CEO of Shugart Associates that was bought out by Xerox, he started another company with Finis Conner in 1979 called Shugart Technology. Because of Xerox copyright infringements on Shugart Associates, the name later changed to what we know as Seagate Technology. It was there that he 1 ii evolved the 8-inch drive to the 5 ⁄4-inch mini-floppy floppy disk drive in 1976 . There is an interesting story that goes behind the change of the floppy disk drive. It has been rumoured 1 that the 5 ⁄4-inch size was chosen because of a complaint made by a customer during a focus group meeting about the size of the disk. According to one of the sales managers at Seagate, the President and Shugart himself sat down with a customer to discuss their 8-inch drive product. When the customer was asked what the size should be, the customer pointed to a napkin on the table and said, "About that 1 size". They returned to their lab with the napkin and designed the 5 ⁄4-inch drive. The commercial model, SA 400, stored 110 kilobytes and sold for 45$ for ten diskettes. This model of the floppy disk was their best selling product with shipments of up to 4000 drives a dayiii. At Seagate, they also produced the 5 MB hard disk drive, in 1980, which fit the 5.25-inch form factor of the Shugart mini-floppy drive. It sold for $1,500 and became a major enabling technology for the PC industry.iv With Shugart as Chief Executive Officer, Seagate became the world’s largest independently owned manufacturer of disk drives and storage devicesv. Seagate introduced the Barracuda HDDs, the industry's first hard disk with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. The first models were available in capacities between 6.8 GB and 28.2 GB. In 2012, they introduced the Barracuda 7200.14 the industry's first 1 TB platter technology. April 2013, Seagate dropped the Barracuda name, and rebranded the series as Desktop HDD. Shugart also dabbled in politics besides computer components. In 1999, Shugart and his daughter, Erickson, fought to have a “none of the above” option on the voting ballot. This would allow disaffected and dissatisfied voters to express their displeasure in very certain terms at the ballot box. Shugart poured $1M of his own personal wealth into the California referendum process to see their scheme become reality. “Proposition 23 would add "none of the above" to all future ballots in the Golden State. Voters displeased with the candidates on the ballot need simply check 'none of the above' on their ballots to make their voices heard.” vi In addition, “[Shugart] entered his dog Ernest, described by Erickson as a 120-pound.Burmese Mountain Dog into a congressional contest in Monterey, California. Shugart pushed Ernest as a write-in candidate, but the dog's participation was disqualified by local election officials, and all write-in votes for Ernest were discarded.”vii It is no doubt that Shugart has had an impact on storage systems and in 1997 he received the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award. He is also featured in the Computer History Museum "for his lifelong contributions to the creation of the modern disk drive industry."viii Shugart passed away December 12th, 2006 due to heart surgery complicationsix. In 2004 the floppy disk was officially declared dead. Built-in floppy disk drives vanished from newly built computers. “They were doomed by their slow speed, low capacity, and relatively poor longevity.”x Apple said their big “I told you so!” as they gave up on the floppy disk back in 1998. “So what has replaced the once ubiquitous floppy disk? As it turns out, the floppy disk has given way to not one successor, but an assortment of contenders to the throne.”xi The Compact Disk, CD for short. The Compact Disk was originally developed to store and play back sound recordings, a read only format. The readable surface of a CD includes a spiral track wound tightly enough to cause light to diffract into a full visible spectrum. The CD also adapted to store data, instead of just sounds and later became the Compact Disc Read-Only Memory or CD-ROM. The standard CD held up to 737MBs of data. CD recordings are designed to be permanent and over time the dye's physical characteristics may change which may cause errors when reading and data loss. The design life is from 20 to 100 years, depending on the quality of the discs, the quality of the writing drive, and storage conditions.xii CD-RWs were later introduced that could re-write data using metallic alloy instead of a dye. They also have a shorter re-writing life cycle with an approximate of 1000 uses. At the time of the technology's introduction it had much greater capacity than computer hard drives common at the time. The reverse is now true, with hard drives far exceeding the capacity of CDs. Capacity per HDD increasing from 3.75 megabytes to 4 terabytes or more, more than a million times larger.xiii In 1999, another major contender for the portable storage war was the USB flash drive, a non-volatile memory. The fact that it was a non-volatile memory (computer memory that can be read and written when not powered) allowed the flash drive to become so popular. It also had no moving parts and could fit on your keychain. The flash drive integrated Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface which all newly built computers have now. There drives physically are more durable than the floppy disk and CD and weigh less than 30 grams. As of January 2013, Kingston, an American multinational computer technology corporation, released the Hyper Predator that can store a whopping 512 gigabytes of data. A year after the release of the flash drive, another non-volatile device called the Secure Digital (SD) cardxiv came into play. This form of portable storage was designed for portable devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras and tablet computers. To access an SD card on your computer, mostly likely you need a card-reader which makes it less desirable as a desktop computer portable storage device. The USB flash drive is superior in its ability to work seamlessly with your operating system. The USB flash drive and the SD card may seem to successfully replace the floppy disk as well as the CD, but cloud storage or cloud computing is eliminating the use of portable storage all together. What this newer data storage offers is access to your data anywhere without a physical device. Your data is virtualized in pools of storage generally hosted by third parties. As long as you have connectivity to your cloud storage through the internet or local servers, you can access your data. Cloud computing is believed to have been invented by Joseph Licklider in the 1960sxv, but since the early years of the internet, bandwidth in the 1990s was very limited. Cloud computing for the masses has been something of a late developer. Much like CDs, and then flash memory to follow, cloud computing seems to be the natural progression of storage technology. http://www.designboom.com/history/floppydisk.html The following article is from designboom In the last few years more and more instances of the floppy have been spotted online, in galleries and our streets and roads! Musicians and media-alchemists have also warmed to the re-use of them for 'anti- corporate' releases. art and design One of the first instances of the floppy disk aesthetic being used in the music world came via New Order's 1983 single 'Blue Monday'. Peter Seville’s die-cut record sleeve is said to have cost so much to produce that factory records actually lost money on each copy sold - hence the sleeve was soon replaced by a similar non-die-cut design. The lavish nature of this piece is somewhat removed from what we see happening with floppy creations today. Numerous 'street artists' blaze their designs across old floppies which are then randomly glued or strategically placed around various public places. Other crafty artists prefer to keep their work indoors such as the American George W. Hart, who's 'disk combobulation' features thirty 3.5 inch floppy disks. Each of them are slotted into each other forming a precise five-color pattern. Fellow floppy enthusiast, Lara Weigand also tried her hand at working with the plastic diskettes, this year she decided to cover her car in them as part of the Seattle art car blowout. The huge amounts of redundant floppies have found their way into the hands of aspiring designers and hobbyists. Online you can find dresses, bags, notebooks and other office novelties conjured up from them. For instance, see imanalchemist's disk designs at instructables. 'geekgear' is also at it, they create basic office supplies such as notepads and pen holders from old 3.5" disks. music and video games whilst the thought of listening to recordings from a floppy might seem unattractive compared to the powerful playing options around today, it's 'low bit rate / old skool' feel has drawn 'progressive' artists to the medium of late. As documented in November’s 'dazed and confused' magazine, several labels such as 'aint bad for a floppy' and 'my little floppy' along with artists like Johan Agebjorn are releasing their music on floppy disks.