įloppy disks became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately beginning in 1972 by Memorex and others. He licensed a number of patents to IBM, reaching licensing agreements with them in the 1970s.

Nippon Columbia planned to commercialized his magnetic disc sheet recorder in 1960. He later received a Japanese patent in 1952, and a 1958 American patent, for a magnetic disk record sheet. The first floppy disk was invented by Yoshiro Nakamatsu at the Tokyo Imperial University in 1950.

While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, flash storage cards, portable external hard disk drives, optical discs, ROM cartridges and storage available through computer networks. These formats are usually handled by older equipment. By the late 2000s, computers were rarely manufactured with installed floppy disk drives 3½-inch floppy disks can be used with an external USB floppy disk drive, but USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and non-standard diskettes are rare to non-existent. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).įloppy disks, initially as 8-inch media and later in 5¼-inch (133 mm) and 3½-inch (90 mm) sizes, were an ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the 1970s into the 2000s. A floppy disk, also called a floppy, diskette or just disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles.

Format floppy disk to 720kb