Floppy disc

The floppy disk emerged from a mundane problem: how to load software updates into mainframe computers without dispatching technicians. In 1967, at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory, Direct Access Storage Product Manager Alan Shugart assigned David Noble to lead a small team developing a reliable, inexpensive solution. The result would dominate personal computing for two decades.

The adjacent possible required magnetic recording technology—already proven in hard disk drives—but demanded a radically different form factor. Hard drives were expensive, delicate, and permanently installed. What IBM needed was removable, cheap, and simple enough for field engineers to use. Noble's team experimented with tape cartridges, RCA 45-rpm records, dictating belts, and a grooved magnetic disk from Telefunken before creating their own solution.

The breakthrough was the flexible magnetic disk—a thin sheet of plastic coated with iron oxide, spinning inside a drive. The team called it the "memory disk"; the industry would call it the floppy. Initially, the disk was bare, but dirt proved a serious problem. They enclosed it in a plastic envelope lined with fabric that wiped the surface clean as it spun.

IBM shipped the first units in 1971: the 23FD "Minnow," an 8-inch floppy disk drive with read-only, removable media. Each disk held 80 kilobytes—equivalent to roughly 3,000 punched cards. The US patent was issued in June 1972 to Ralph Flores and Herbert Thompson, who had taken over the project after Noble departed.

Alan Shugart left IBM in 1969 and moved to Memorex, where his team shipped the Memorex 650 in 1972—the first read-write floppy disk drive. In 1973, he founded Shugart Associates, which became the dominant manufacturer of 8-inch drives. In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the 5.25-inch floppy, shrinking the format for desktop computers. By 1978, over ten manufacturers produced 5.25-inch drives.

The cascade from the floppy disk transformed computing. Before floppies, software distribution required magnetic tape or physical rewiring. After floppies, software became a commodity that could be packaged, mailed, and resold. The personal computer revolution depended on this portability. Apple II owners exchanged programs on floppy disks. IBM PCs booted from them. Early viruses spread through them.

Sony introduced the 3.5-inch floppy in 1981, encasing the magnetic disk in a rigid plastic shell with a sliding metal cover. This became the dominant format from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. By peak adoption, over 5 billion floppy disks were sold annually.

Path dependence created successive waves of format wars. Each size reduction—8-inch to 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch—required new drives, new software distribution, and relearning. The installed base of older formats slowed adoption of each successor. When CD-ROMs and USB flash drives finally displaced floppies, they inherited the concept of removable media that Noble's team had established.

By 2026, the floppy disk is obsolete for data storage but immortal as an icon. The "save" button in software worldwide still displays a 3.5-inch floppy disk—a visual metaphor understood by millions who have never seen the physical object. The flexible magnetic disk that IBM invented to load mainframe updates became the symbol of saving anything digital.