i know most people haven't used one of these in years but have you ever stopped to think
of what a brilliant piece of engineering the three and a half inch floppy disk is
it was introduced by sony in 1982 and remained in common use for at least two decades beyond that
and even today its unmistakable shape lives on as the universal icon for saving a document
the first floppy disks were introduced in the early 1970s and were eight inches but
they were not commonly used with personal computers due to their high cost and
bulky size and then when the five and a quarter inch floppy disk was introduced
they called it the mini floppy disk so the next logical step for the three and a half inch disk
was to call it the micro floppy disk or some brands just called it a micro disk
but the big blue giant of computing ibm referred to them as diskettes so
the majority of the industry followed ibm's lead and used that terminology as well but in everyday
language most people call them floppy disks so you'll see the two terms used interchangeably
and if you ever wondered how to say double density diskettes in french it's double density diskettes
yeah thanks for that 3m
and back in the '80s and '90s some people mistakenly referred to these as hard disks
because they might have heard the term hard disk but they probably didn't really know
what it meant so they figured if this is a floppy disk then this must be a hard disk
and when three and a half inch disks were introduced they were really a godsend for
novice users because they solved a lot of problems that people had with five and a quarter inch
floppy disks even something as simple as how to remove the disk from its protective envelope
"and the instructions in the book said take a diskette
from its protective envelope now the protective envelope stayed in the box as it often does
and all he had in his hands was this and he read the paragraph again remove the diskette
from its protective envelope so he did
now he didn't do it quite as dramatically as that you're going to see it on the videotape
but it is i went to poughkeepsie with this story and they said oh yeah you
know we've been people been tearing these things up for years! years!"
or putting the floppy disk in the drive there's eight possible ways to put one of these in a drive
but only one of them is going to work there's nothing to stop you from putting it in backwards
or putting in sideways whereas with a three and a half inch disk
you can try putting it in upside down and backwards but only goes in part way
you can try putting in sideways it doesn't even fit upside down
that way doesn't fit backwards like that doesn't fit the only way that works is the way that works
that's because this little angled off corner and these notches in the back aren't just there
for decoration they are what ensures that you can only put it in the drive the correct way
and to help you not make that mistake of putting in the disk the wrong way
even has this helpful little arrow indicating the proper orientation
three and a half inch diskettes also did away with the need to close a latch or door when
inserting the disk you just pop in the disk and it automatically locks into place and when you
want to remove it again you don't need to open the latch and pull it out you just push a button
and it pops out and if you were lucky enough to own a macintosh you had automatic eject
and with five and a quarter inch floppy disks people will get their greasy fingers on the
open area here and their data would be ruined they would crease the disc
and their data was ruined they would staple it to a piece of paper and their data was ruined
in fact even just pressing too hard when writing on the label with a ballpoint pen
or pencil or attaching a paper clip can damage a five and a quarter inch diskette
the hard plastic shell and protective shutter makes the three and a half inch diskette
impervious to that kind of damage although the very early three and a half inch diskettes did
not have an automatic shutter you had to slide it open and closed manually this is a slightly later
one which can work in either a manual shutter or automatic shutter drive it says auto shutter
and is spring loaded just like later ones but if you hold it open a little bit beyond its normal
position it stays open and then you notice it says pinch here you pinch it and it snaps shut
and speaking of which did you know that the first
computer in north america to use the three and a half inch diskette
was not the apple macintosh it was actually the hp 150 touchscreen computer in 1983
and until sometime in the late 1980s most three and a half inch diskettes came in these clear
plastic pockets i guess these were supposed to help protect the disks but most people would
just take this off and throw it away so what good is it that's why they got rid of those
another sign of cost cutting came about a decade later when many diskettes
switched from using metal shutters to plastic shutters
they still work perfectly fine they just feel a bit cheaper and lighter
another advantage of three and a half inch diskettes is when you want to write protect your
data with five and a quarter inch discs they came with this notch here which indicated it was okay
to write to the disk so when you wanted to write protect it you had to use these stick on labels
and cover up the notch and sometimes these would get stuck and they would get ripped
off inside the drive when you go to remove the disk it would get caught in the mechanism
with three and a half inch diskettes the write protect has a built-in sliding tab you leave it
up like this to enable writing to the disk or you can slide it down to write protect the disk
and commercially pre-recorded software would often come without that sliding tab
so it was permanently write protected
this cutout on the other side of the disk also serves a purpose and that is to automatically tell
the drive which capacity of disk you have inserted with a high density disk you'll have this cutout
here well with a double density disk it will not whereas with five and a quarter inch floppy disks
there is no way for the computer to tell the difference between a double density disk
and a high density disk it has to trust the user to make the correct choice
there were also 2.88 megabyte extended density
three and a half inch disks but these were never widely used because they were very expensive
very few computers supported them mostly just a few ibm ps/2s and by the time people needed
this kind of capacity they were moving on to things like zip disks and recordable cds
but you can see once again this has a special notch in the different position than a normal
high density disk so that way the computer can tell the difference between the two
and the final evolution of the three and a half inch diskette which most people never used
was the 120 megabyte superdisk also known as ls120 these were designed to be backwards compatible
with standard three and a half inch diskettes so if you had a drive
that supported these disks it could also read regular three and a half inch disks
you can see the physical form factor is basically identical
except the shutter design is a little bit more fancy these use laser servo technology
and they store 120 megabytes they later came out with a 240 megabyte version although those were
not as popular but you can see these carried over many of the same physical design features
as normal three and a half inch diskettes even including the sliding built-in write protect tab
but as much as i think three and a half inch diskettes were a masterpiece
of design and engineering they do have some drawbacks one is a rather silly one
and that is they could never seem to agree which way to put the label either with the
label at the top because that's the way five and a quarter inch disks always did it
and because it makes it easier to see the label when you're flipping through a box of disks
or with the label at the bottom because that's the way you put the disk into the drive
and a more serious problem is that if you got a little too rambunctious
when removing one of these from the drive it was not uncommon for it to rip off the metal shutter
the disk will still work fine it will just lose that physical protection of its surface
and it's not uncommon if you have a drive that gets jammed and won't let you put in
the disk all the way to open it up and find one of these lodged inside
it is actually possible to reinstall one of these shutters or one taken from a donor disk
although it takes a level of skill and patience that i don't have
but since this disk is already ruined let's open it up
and see what's inside not as easy as as with a five and a quarter inch disk
but there you can see there's the floppy disk inside and it actually has this felt
material to help keep the disk clean so that's what's inside a three and a half inch diskette
so the next time you see a three and a half inch diskette hopefully you'll stop
and take a moment to think about what a work of genius these things really are