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Did the term "floppy" really come from the 5.25"? I seem to remember that the 8" disk drive was almost impossible to insert without a third hand as support. I

by husted 16y ago

Did the term "floppy" really come from the 5.25"? I seem to remember that the 8" disk drive was almost impossible to insert without a third hand as support. I just had a look around the office and we still have a number of instruments (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and such) with disk drives. I'm pretty sure that no one uses them (the disk drives) because none of our laptops can read the disks.

hga 16y ago
No, it indeed came from the original 8" variety. I started in the microcomputer scene just as 5.25" floppies were thoroughly taking over the scene and heard stories about the 8" ones. From Wikipedia and memory: IBM does a 8" read only for loading firmware into mainframes in 1971. Memorex and Shugart come out with R/W ones in the following 2 years. Shugart comes out with the first 5.25" one in 1976, it has only a fraction of the capacity of 8" drives of that year or the following. In 1978 5.25" drives start getting a respectable amount of memory (360KB on a side) and that's the end of the 8" form factor, no more new models come out. As you note, the 8" disks are very big and cumbersome and I'm sure they and their mechanisms were a lot more expensive.
- bockris 16y ago
  One of my college jobs was night operator for a bank which ran on a IBM S/36 (model 5360) and our backup was two magazines of 10 8in floppy disks in each. The 5360 had an auto loading mechanism and I could gauge how close the backup was to being done by the position of the magazine. Good times.
  - bockris 16y ago
    Replying to self. Lots of pictures here. http://www.corestore.org/36.htm http://www.corestore.org/36.htm
    - hga 16y ago
      Very cool, thanks for sharing that with us. Love those old style straight stroke solenoid head actuators on the disks (Winchesters?). Brings back memories of '70s era CDC SMD disk pack drives. Which would frequently blow their driving power transistors; I had a friend who'd pop the caps and reattach the leads, this was for a small student run computer center with no budget to speak of, using all sorts of surplus equipment, in this case the prototype Lisp Machine's disk drive with a prototype Xylogics 4 card wire wrap UNIBUS controller (Mylar sheets between the card to prevent shorts).
- ajross 16y ago
  Um... if the IBM drives were read-only, how did they get the firmware onto the disks in the first place? :) Floppies were writable media from the beginning. It's just that IBM didn't use them as portable media in their first implementation.
  - hga 16y ago
    The last thing they wanted would be for customers to modify the firmware in the field ^_^. Plus they would be cheaper. I suspect they had a few machines back in New York that would write official firmware releases, which field service would then keep in stock and deliver to sites as needed.

by husted 16y ago

hga 16y ago

No, it indeed came from the original 8" variety. I started in the microcomputer scene just as 5.25" floppies were thoroughly taking over the scene and heard stories about the 8" ones. From Wikipedia and memory: IBM does a 8" read only for loading firmware into mainframes in 1971. Memorex and Shugart come out with R/W ones in the following 2 years. Shugart comes out with the first 5.25" one in 1976, it has only a fraction of the capacity of 8" drives of that year or the following. In 1978 5.25" drives start getting a respectable amount of memory (360KB on a side) and that's the end of the 8" form factor, no more new models come out. As you note, the 8" disks are very big and cumbersome and I'm sure they and their mechanisms were a lot more expensive.

bockris 16y ago
One of my college jobs was night operator for a bank which ran on a IBM S/36 (model 5360) and our backup was two magazines of 10 8in floppy disks in each. The 5360 had an auto loading mechanism and I could gauge how close the backup was to being done by the position of the magazine. Good times.
- bockris 16y ago
  Replying to self. Lots of pictures here. http://www.corestore.org/36.htm http://www.corestore.org/36.htm
  - hga 16y ago
    Very cool, thanks for sharing that with us. Love those old style straight stroke solenoid head actuators on the disks (Winchesters?). Brings back memories of '70s era CDC SMD disk pack drives. Which would frequently blow their driving power transistors; I had a friend who'd pop the caps and reattach the leads, this was for a small student run computer center with no budget to speak of, using all sorts of surplus equipment, in this case the prototype Lisp Machine's disk drive with a prototype Xylogics 4 card wire wrap UNIBUS controller (Mylar sheets between the card to prevent shorts).
ajross 16y ago
Um... if the IBM drives were read-only, how did they get the firmware onto the disks in the first place? :) Floppies were writable media from the beginning. It's just that IBM didn't use them as portable media in their first implementation.
- hga 16y ago
  The last thing they wanted would be for customers to modify the firmware in the field ^_^. Plus they would be cheaper. I suspect they had a few machines back in New York that would write official firmware releases, which field service would then keep in stock and deliver to sites as needed.