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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
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Origins of the
Floppy Drive
The floppy drive was first conceived in 1967 at IBM's San Jose Research
and Engineering Laboratory in a project headed by David Noble. The technology's
initial purpose was "to store the computer's initial control program,
as well as to hold the machine's microprogram" for IBM's System/370
line of mainframes. (Ceruzzi, p. 232) Aside from their enormous size (8
inches), the first commerically available floppies from IBM, announced
in 1971, were remarkably similar to the floppies of today in construction,
consisting of "a thin plastic substrate coated on both sides"
that was "permanently sealed in a protective envelope." (Kean,
p. 84)
Within a few years, the floppy disk and drive began making their way into
other IBM systems and from there, other companies' systems. By the late
70s, 8- and 5.25-inch floppy disk drives were available for minicomputers
like the Altair as kits or fully assembled; however, exorbitant prices
(as much as $1649) and the lack of a formatting standard prevented their
widespread adoption. (Haddock, pp. 221, 223) Some form of permanent storage
was desperately needed, as hobbyists were otherwise forced to type in
programs by hand every time they wanted to run them.
Tape drives provided
a much more affordable option for hobbyists at the time, but the tape's
ponderous performance and lack of random access were less than ideal.
Steve Wozniak had developed an cassette tape drive interface for the Apple
II, but as Gary Kildall of Digital Research wrote:
"The cassette system is particularly frustrating. I used two different
recorders and found them both equally unreliable. . . I must consider
the backup storage system as low-end hobbyist grade." (Moritz,
pp. 209-210)
Clearly a better storage solution was needed to propel the personal computer
(and Apple) into the big leagues. |
