This video ended up being wildly different from what I originally planned. I wanted to fanboy
about HP releasing the first 3.5in floppy drive in the US, but had that assumption turned upside
down when digging into it more. There was also a ton of drama around deciding on what would even
be the microfloppy standard format. I ended up spending about a month on this video and
have done more research for it than any other before it. There have been a lot of interesting
things to look into, like did you know this was originally called a cassette? So today we're
going to go over the origins of the 3.5in floppy, the ubiquitous floppy disk that should have taken
over the world a lot sooner. And, I'm going to dispute some of the accepted history around it.
After the 8 inch and 5.25 inch floppy disks it was considered inevitable that there would be
another format that would shrink it down one more time. Informally the concept was considered the
"shirt-pocket" disk, an idea so ingrained that at one point a writer of Byte joked it might
be easier to just make shirt pockets bigger to settle the later competing disk standards. The
standard 8 inch disk was created by IBM in 1973 for the 3740 drive, compatibility with that drive
and disk formats spread throughout the industry as it made distributing data much easier than
other options like printed text or paper tape. 8 inch disks are massive though and Shugart managed
to shrink the concept down to 5.25 inch in 1976 with the SA-400. This drive found it's way into
some of the biggest computers of 1977 making it another standard. But everyone knew that this
disk wasn't going to be the final solution, it was still inconveniently large as well as
fragile with its susceptibility to bending and easily damaged media. The 3.5in disk that became
so popular though wouldn't really establish its dominance until 1984 when Apple released the new
Macintosh platform. Before that was a battle between manufacturers to claim the crown of
microfloppy, but what everyone didn't know, was that this battle was over before it even started.
The 3.5 inch, or perhaps more correctly, 9 cm floppy disk was developed by Sony. They actually
have a company history page talking about this development process that I would say , while not
perfect, is fairly accurate as almost everything I could externally verify that they talk about
matches up with other sources. In 1979 Sony was trying to break into the more technical focused
portion of the US market and aimed to make a Word Processor. For reasons I still don't fully
understand and they don't elaborate on, they also decided to eschew standard components like
the 5.25 inch disk and opted to make their own. It made some sense because Sony would be able
to produce every part of the machine themselves then. Sony didn't mess around with this either,
they made an all new drive and disk format that was smaller and held the same amount of
data on one side a double sided 5.25 inch drive at the time did. The word processor
they made would be known as the Series 35, it used a portrait orientation CRT,
that Sony was able to make themselves, with everything else integrated into a single
keyboard case. This machine was introduced in early 1981 at the eye watering cost of $9,000,
so it didn't exactly take the world by storm. But those floppy drives would vastly out live it, they
were the OA-D30V Microfloppy drive, also known as an MFD. But these drives were not only new, they
are the 3.5 inch floppy drives that would later become so common. Sony wasn't just interested in
being a full product company though, they wanted to work with other manufacturers to integrate
these new floppy drives into their products. Sony was advertising this at least as early as
April of 1981 as can be seen here in Byte.They just had to put up with a fight to get there.
Let's take a small break with an interesting anecdote about the size of these drives,
they are twice as tall as later 3.5 drives are. But they aren't "full height",
officially that is the same as a half height 5.25in drive like a CD drive,
which this is taller than. I would say it might be more accurate to call these
"double height" drives. I have no idea why Sony made them this size, nothing else like
early tape drives or HDDs I have match them, they are just unique. Now, back to the history.
Sony didn't get any takers for the drive in 1981. Before we go on with the history, I just want to
let that sink in. In late 1981 IBM released the first PC, after the 3.5 inch drive was available.
There probably wasn't time for IBM to get it integrated, but I find it very amusing that
the first PC was released with an audio cassette port after the 3.5 inch disk was available. But
hindsight is 2020 and with how obvious it was that a new smaller floppy disk format would be
made there was a trepidation to align with one format too early. And there were a handful of
competitors that started showing up in 1982, but the most prominent one was announced by
Matushita and Hitachi. This was the CFD, compact floppy disk, a 3 inch media format. And within
a few months there were commercially available drives being sold by companies like Amdek. The
CFD was being taken to trade shows and shown to attract more support for it. At least three
other companies joined on to support the CFD as the best option. Companies were taking sides on
this to submit a joint standards proposal to ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. Oddly,
these are all Japanese companies submitting these proposals, the American companies that had created
the initial floppy disk standards weren't having an easy time of making their own smaller drives.
There were notable technical differences between the CFD and Sony's MFD beyond the size between
the drives, the CFD was a 300 RPM 40 track drive which was essentially a scaled down 5.25in drive.
The Sony was 70 tracks initially and 600 RPM. More importantly the Sony drive had a different
interface from the Shugart standard that previous drives used. This was one of a number of issues
other companies raised with the Sony drive and disks. For example, Sony used disks with a shutter
over the media to protect it, which was great, but the shutter had to be manually moved and
could unintentionally expose the media to damage. The manual shutter is actually something I've been
trying to find more info about, while the earliest disks I have do latch open, earlier ones wouldn't
have closed with a spring. I also haven't been able to find a drive that needs it. I suspect it
may have been a very short batch of them like that before they changed to auto shutter disks. The CFD
was generally not as capable though being both slower and lower capacity. But both formats had
their supporters pushing to make their format the new standard. Eventually ANSI gave up and
said they would just let the companies duke it out in the market to decided. Now there was an
ANSI subcommity known as the MIC, Microfloppy Industry Committee, made of many more companies
that did like the Sony disk concept, but wanted some of the issues addressed. Sony was open to
this and and the drives I've been showing here are the later revised OA-D31V from 1983. Some changes
were made include the spring arm to open and close the new purely auto shutter disks along with some
other minor improvements. Sony would also release the OA-D32V and 32W that bumped the tracks up to
80 per side and made it double sided respectively. These revised models started to get more support,
but even before this the Sony drive had been making some significant headway in the market.
Let's jump back to 1982. The CFD was being released as a standalone drive,
great for getting it into consumers hands quickly, but it wasn't getting upstream
support from OEMs and software vendors. This is where Sony was taking a different approach. Sony
wanted to do two things with this drive, get it into other companies devices, and release their
own computer with it. A computer from Sony had been speculated since the previous year,
but Sony was really dragging their feet on releasing it. In May of 1982 Sony finally put
out a press release that revealed it, the Z80 based SMC-70, but said that it wouldn't ship
until September of that year. They were working with software companies to get products ready for
it and still working out a distribution network for final point of sale. While this was going on,
Sony was also working on a deal with another company to provide them with 3.5 inch drives.
There had been rumors that HP was going to use Sony's new drive that were confirmed,
in May as well actually, with the announcement of a $30M contract between Sony and HP to supply
drives. These are the drives that would eventually be put into the 9121 unit I have that started all
this research. HP was a massive partner for Sony to get and brought a lot of credibility to the
3.5 inch format. This partnership lasted for some time as well as HP continued using them all the
way up to the 9122C drive with high density disk support. Even non-computer devices like the 16500
series Logic Analyzer I have used Sony drives. HP was able to fully embrace the, at the time,
uncommon drive thanks to their custom LIF file system and AMIGO and CS80 interface protocols.
But still this showed success with the drives, and this partnership can likely be directly
attributed to what I consider the nail in the coffin of the format wars when Apple announced
the Macintosh in 1984, also using Sony 3.5 inch drives. This brought the format mainstream and
though the CFD was still trying to cling to life in 1984, by '85 even companies that supported it
started making Sony compatible products. In 1986 IBM would also finally adopt the 3.5in
floppy with the PC Convertible confirming its position as the next major floppy standard.
At this point in my research I was pretty happy with the overall information I had been able to
put in place here. But there was one thing still bugging me, was it Sony or HP that got the first
computer out with a 3.5 inch floppy drive? In this era you didn't really get official "release dates"
for things because the products were distributed through other companies to be sold at retail. The
conventional wisdom has been that Sony was first, but everything I kept reading said it "will"
release in September, not so much that it did other than Sony's own site. The HP was a lot more
nebulous, the manual for the 9121 is vaguely dated 1982. So I decided to do more digging. In June of
1982 Sony was showing a very complete looking SMC-70 while mentioning they were still working
out how to sell it. As an aside lets revel in Bill Gates, for some reason, absolutely blasting it and
saying no one will buy one. Which he wasn't really wrong about because it was a CP/M system that was
about to get decimated by the PC and MS-DOS duo. Now in this same June issue of InfoWorld there
is also an announcement about the HP partnership, but we know that is old news based on an official
press release in May. Delays between article publication and events or announcements started
becoming much more apparent to me during this process and I started having to figure out where
and when information originally came from. Two more better sources though were a later Interface
Age issue that confirms distribution beginning in September, and Australian Business Computer that
knew it was announced in May and claimed to be sold in October. So I would say September-October
sounds pretty accurate based on the evidence. Meanwhile the first announcement from HP I could
find was in November of 1982 where they showed the drive and also talked about it being used
with the new HP 120 computer. And the manual for that computer gives a first edition date of
November 1982 as well. So it seems pretty clear the SMC-70 did in fact release before the 9121
drive which may not have even shipped until 1983. However, there was this one little weird thing I
found while trying to figure all this out. This one line in a September 1982 issue of InfoWorld
that at said "One manufacturer, Jonos Computers, is already offering a computer that uses twin Sony
micro-floppy drives." Two things there left me with even more questions, who on earth is "Jonos"?
And that word, "already". That one line spiraled this video out of control, did this computer
exist and could it have possibly beat Sony to be the first computer with their own product?
Well I can confirm first hand, it did exist. Pinning down the release though is a lot harder.
It turned out that in the same month that Sony announced the SMC-70 and the $30M deal with HP,
they also announced a much smaller $1M contract with the company Jonos Ltd. Jonos had been around
for only two years, but just earlier in February 1982 was advertising new terminals and RAM cards
likely for S-100 systems. They were a growing company and it seemed they also wanted to get
in on the home computer market and were looking to make a complete system themselves. Already
knowing how to make a machine like a terminal and the internal components of a computer made
this fairly easy, they just needed the parts supplies to put them together. After signing the
deal in May with Sony, Jonos had a working system complete and called it the Courier. It is a very
simple STD backplane machine with an integrated terminal running on an 8085 and a CPU card with
a Z80 designed to run CP/M. This machine was shown off as early as June 7th at the National Computer
Conference. Not only was it being shown though, Jonos had a full array of addons available for it,
like additional interface cards, an attachable printer, and a Gucci carry case. And of course,
it had Sony 3.5 inch floppy drives. Now we only have Sony's announcement of when the
contract was signed for when Jonos had the drives secured, but it sure seems like they
had been working on it for a lot longer than a month. Not only that, they already had worked
out some 3rd party contracts like a deal with Olivetti to provide customer service. And in at
least as early as August of 1982 Jonos even had print advertisements for the system. In
many of the discussions around the floppy disk standards battle Jonos was brought up right along
side HP as a user of the Sony drives. They were a small company, around 30 employees. So if they
weren't actually producing something I doubt they would be getting treated like this. Being
small also benefited them for new radical products like this because there was low risk to innovate
and they could get them designed much faster than larger companies with slow corporate structures.
From all my research, I see no reason to doubt the Jonos was available with 3.5 inch floppies
before the Sony SMC-70 came to market. I would even go as far as to say that it was likely
available to purchase at and after the June NCC show with the journalist there saying it
"is" available at a price of $3995. So I'm going to make the claim here and now,
Jonos Ltd. was the first company to sell a computer with a 3.5in floppy drive. Jonos
even continued to produce and evolve the computer, around the time the ANSI committee modified Sony
drives came out Jonos renamed the Courier to the Escort and introduced the elevated model
I have here with more RAM and features. It went on to be reviewed in publications
like Popular Science where it's 3.5in drives still made it stand out. There's a lot more
to say about this very interesting computer, but that should be left for another video.
Back to the floppies themselves, Sony was the one making the drives in all of the computers
we've talked about so far, but getting other companies to make drives as well was a big step
in wider support. Tandon was first with the TM35 drive in late 1982. In 1983 Shugart announced the
SA300 drive that supported the Sony format. Other manufactured like Teac and Mitsumi would join in
too. In 1987 the final common version of the 3.5 inch disk with High Density sectors came
out. On PC systems it was formatted to hold about 1.4MB of data. This was the last widely
accepted version of the floppy disk. There was a 2.8MB version and other different formats like
the ZIP disk and SuperDisk that were introduced but before they could dethrone the HD Sony disk,
the CD-ROM came out holding far more data and also partially designed by Sony. Even then,
1.4MB drives continued to be the easiest way to move around small files until flash
drives became affordable. Sony continued making HD Microfloppy disks until 2011,
ending it's reign after three decades. The majority people never touched an 8 inch disk,
and 5.25 inch disks were being phased by the 90s. So when most people think of a floppy disk,
they think of the product Sony developed that had to fight for its place, but definitely left
its mark in computer history. Well, that's it for this video about the origins of the 3.5"
floppy drive. I have a massive shout out to give to DigitalIceAge, who did help me a tremendous
amount with research on this video. Thank you. If you enjoyed this video though, you may want
to follow to be notified when I release another one. And if you want to help support the channel,
you can find me on Patreon. But for now, that's it, and I will see you next time.