Apple and the

Floppy Drive

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Origins of the Floppy Drive

Woz's Floppy Drive Miracle

Lisa, the Apple III, and the Twiggy Fiasco

Mass storage and the Macintosh Project

A Floppy for Macintosh

Manual vs. Auto Eject: The Great Floppy Debate

iMac and the End of an Era

Sources

Woz's Floppy Drive Miracle

Apple was well aware of the shortcomings of cassette tape storage and sought out Shugart to supply floppy drives for Apple systems. The missing link for Apple II floppy support was a floppy drive controller card. The company turned to its resident genius and co-founder, Steve Wozniak, to design the card.

Woz and Jobs with the Apple I

Woz began reading technical manuals on drives but made little progress on the controller until December 1977 when Mike Markkula made the floppy drive Apple's top priority. Woz then made the project the center of his existence, setting his sights on producing a working prototype by the time of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 1978.

With a seemingly impossible time constraint and little previous experience in drive design, Wozniak and Randy Wigginton went to work on the hardware and software for the controller. Woz turned on "his inimitable electronic brew, the Wozniak alchemy" and in two weeks of nearly continuous labor created a brilliant drive controller design that used far fewer chips than the competition. (Garr, pp. 102-103) At CES, the design impressed both passers-by, competitors, and even Woz himself, who called the controller "the favorite design of my life." (Moritz, p. 210)

The controller pushed Apple to the forefront of the nascent PC industry by spurring sales, encouraging software development, and creating a huge backlog of orders for Apple's 5.25-inch floppy drives. In 1982, IBM released its IBM PC with a 5.25-inch floppy drive, further establishing the floppy as the standard in personal computing data storage.