Floppy disk
𐑓𐑤𐑪𐑐𐑦 𐑛𐑦𐑕𐑒
Being born in the UK in 1981, my articles about home computers are biased towards that time and place. This is due to both my own personal experience, and also a conscious attempt to provide an alternative UK bias to the predominant US bias amongst English-speaking people my age reminiscing about home computers.
A floppy disk was a storage medium for digital data.
Compared to cassette tapes, floppy disks were much quicker, and allowed random access — you could jump from the first file straight to the last one without having to wait for anything to fast-forward. These two factors made them much more convenient.
On the downside, floppy disks offered less storage space than a particularly lengthy tape, though it's doubtful many people noticed. What they did notice was that floppy disk drives were prohobitively expensive during the 8-bit home computer era, doubly so for the children who actually used the computers.
It was a lucky C64 user indeed who could afford a 5.25″ disk drive. For ZX Spectrum owners, using disks was practically unheard of.
By the time 8-bit home computers were replaced with their 16-bit counterparts, chiefly the Amiga and ST, floppy disk drives — the smaller 3.5″ variety, no less — were a part of the machine, hidden neatly behind the keyboard. (Meanwhile, the latest generation of Soviet ZX Spectrum clones also started to use 3.5″ floppy disks as standard, as they evolved to compete with IBM PC clones.)
Much later, on iMacs and beige boxes, floppy disks were made obsolete by USB memory sticks and SD cards. Both use NAND flash memory to store much more information in a smaller physical space, without any moving parts.
5.25″
5.25″ floppy disks are encased in a (usually black) soft protective case. The case exposes a thin sliver of the disk at the bottom. 5.25″ floppy disks come in a few varieties:
SS SD floppy disks are single sided, single density.
SS DD floppy disks are single sided, double density.
DS DD floppy disks are double sided, double density.
DS HD floppy disks are double sided, high density.
Although the disks were sometimes double sided, the drives usually weren't, requiring you to eject and flip around the disk, much like a vinyl record or cassette tape.
3.5″
3.5″ floppy disks are encased in a (usually blue) hard protective caddy, but the disks themselves are still floppy. The thin sliver of disk at the bottom is protected by a sliding piece of metal. 3.5″ floppy disks also come in a few varieties:
MF-2DD floppy disks are micro floppy, double sided, double density. They can hold up to about 1 MB of data, some of which gets lost to the entropy of the filesystem. They have a small square right-protect tab in the lower left corner (filled to allow writing, or showing a gap to protect against it), while the lower right corner is plain.
MF-2HD floppy disks are micro floppy, double sided, high density. They can hold up to about 2 MB of data pre-formatting. They have a small square right-protect tab in the lower left corner, and a permanent small square hole in lower right corner.
Quick Disk
Quick Disks were a far less common format, used in a few samplers and MIDI sequencers (along with home computers, consoles, and word processors). Due to their obscurity, they're best avoided if possible.
Data storage media: CD | Cassette tape | Cassette tape as a data storage medium | DAT | Floppy disk | IBM Card | MiniDisc | microSD card
