The engineer in charge of carrying out this task was Alan Shugart who in 1967 began working on what would end up being the first floppy disk drive and the first floppy disk, which was 8 inches. The origin of the floppy disk is in the IBM System / 370, a family of IBM mainframes that were launched in 1970 and where one of the challenges that they wanted to solve was the introduction of programs in a format that was fast as well as cheap. The answer came with floppy disks, but their origin dates back long before the birth of the first home computers. Most over-formatting utilities don't handle ED disks, as the format never gained much popularity.Therefore, a format that would allow random access to the data without having to load all the contents of the floppy disks to the computer’s RAM memory quickly became necessary and therefore only the necessary elements were loaded into memory. Current archiving tools like Winimage also support disks with increased capacity. Even Microsoft made use of this by introducing the DMF format (1.68 MB) for distributing software on disks. Well known tools are fdformat (fdread), vgacopy (vgaread). By loading a small TSR-driver such formatted disks could be used like the normal 1.44 MB formatted disks in DOS. Software utilities appeared that could format disks to higher capacities like 1.72 MB. In the 1990s the demand for higher capacities increased. On older Macs the DD disks formatted to around 820 KB, and on Amiga 880 KB. On PC's, DD disks were usually (DOS-)formatted to 720 KB (though in practice it had about 714 KB of usable space), HD disks formatted to 1.44 MB (in practice it was around 1.38 MB) and the uncommon 2.88 MB disks (primarily used in IBM PS/2s) formatted to around 2.76MB. Like earlier floppies, there were many different ways to format a disk, often depending on what type of computer the disk was formatted with. Despite the more rugged design, 3.5 inch floppy drives tend to to be less reliable due to their compact nature.ģ.5" floppies came in three different densities (easily distinguished by a second hole on the side) and while only the earliest disks were single sided, almost all 3.5" floppies can be written to on both sides. The disks are housed in a stiff casing, opposed to the "floppy" plastic the 5.25" disk was housed in.
This format was designed to be smaller than the 5.25" floppy drive and its media and fixed some of the 5.25" design problems.
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