Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk

[@LGR]

Phenomenal work on this one, Shelby! Props for following all the rabbits down their various rabbit holes and then seeking out that rare hardware to get to the bottom of the story. I love seeing commonly accepted tech history being expanded upon and corrected like this, especially with something as iconic as the 3.5" disk.

[@TechTangents]

Thanks! This one had a *ton* of rabbit holes I even cut for the video! Like technically the "Computer Devices DOT" was the first PC compatible-ish computer with 3.5in drives! But it was fascinating to put all the pieces in place for this one and finally understand how it all played out. And I cannot believe the right-place-right-time with the Jonos to actually get one and am really looking forward to shedding more light soon!

[@ReggieArford]

@@TechTangents And then there's this: The Apple LISA (!) used 3.5" floppies, just like its successor the Macintosh did.

[@peti7788]

@LGR The first 3,5 disk was developed by Marcell Jánosi at the Budapest Rádiótechnikai Gyár (BRG) in 1973. The disk and the associated BRG MCD-1 type drive received domestic patent protection in 1974. The BRG factory negotiated with Sony for a long time, but in the end Sony did not wait and meanwhile developed its own version. But Sony took over the basic idea from BRG.

[@greggv8]

@@ReggieArford Lisa used 5.25" "Twiggy" drives that use disks the same size as Shugart 5.25" drives but they're not compatible. Since Lisa was a sales flop, Apple revamped the computer as the Macintosh XL with 3.5" drives and the Macintosh System ported to it.

[@ReggieArford]

@@greggv8 Really? The two Lisas I own both have OEM 3.5" drives. The documentation I've got shows 3.5" drives. The documentation I've seen shows 3.5" drives. KZbin videos I've seen all have 3.5' drives. Please cite your source(s).

[@ssalient]

The 3.5” disk will probably never be forgotten as it’s the universal save-icon in almost all programs.

[@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB]

smartphone and web apps don't have save icons anymore, they save automatically, so I'm not sure about that!

[@the_kombinator]

And they fly well when thrown ;)

[@itsagundamFAN6969]

Smart phones auto save and don’t use the Icon, sorry bud your a boomer

[@the_kombinator]

@@itsagundamFAN6969 And what if he is? You're implying that it has some negative connotations like a sex offender or some Marxist.

[@JaredConnell]

​@@the_kombinatorwow that took a strange turn.

[@vwestlife]

For a closer look at the 3.5 inch diskette's many innovative design features, see my video "The genius engineering of the 3½ inch floppy disk".

[@dv_vid]

When I was a teenager in 1995, I was given a Compaq SLT/286. I took it apart and messed up the floppy drive which was a Citizen customized for that laptop. I bought a standard 34 pin TEAC drive to replace it but the cable had 20 pins. I spent the summer of 1995 going to the library to research the signals and bought a logic probe from RadioShack to reverse engineer the pins. Then I took the 20 pin ribbon cable and mapped it into a 34 pin receptacle.

[@eddiehimself]

I do think it's funny how it was developed by Sony, who originally defined it in metric as being 90 mm wide but we then called it 3.5" to fit in with the convention of 8" and 5.25" floppy drives lol.

[@JamesTK]

Yeah, an actual 3.5" floppy wouldn't even be compatible... 🤣

[@2dfx]

Americans gonna American I guess...

[@thisnthat3530]

On all the boxes of 3.5" floppies I saw where there was french text it was labelled as an 89mm floppy. 89mm is closer to 3.5" than 90mm so maybe it was actually designed as 3.5" to begin with?

[@AGFuzzyPancake]

I am always floored when I give people measurements in millimeters or centimeters in the US and get replies like "what's that in inches? I don't know metric". These are generally people over 40. I worked at a printing company once, and we would measure things down to 16ths of inches. The spite Americans have for metric measurement knows no limits.

[@quayzar1]

@@AGFuzzyPancake Unfortunately when Ronald Reagan killed our plans to fully switch to metric a lot of people dug in their heels. I'm 35 and was taught metric primarily in school but once I became an adult there was little sold here with metric measurements. Even tape measurers are not usually printed with metric and sae which is ridiculous. On the other hand I drive a Ford and every bolt on it is in metric.

[@PrinceAlhorian]

Here in South Africa we called the 8 inch and 5.25 inch disks "Floppy" disks, because they were so flexible. The 3.5 inch we called "Stiffies" because of the hardend plastic chassis.

[@FooneTuring]

I'm frankly disappointed this video isn't just a biography of me! But I all seriousness, awesome research!

[@TechTangents]

At least you got a cameo! And thanks! It was a lot of work to make sure I really nailed the research on this one.

[@IcyEyeG]

The most fascinating thing to me about your research is the relatively short window of time in which everything transpired. I got my first PC in 1993, and as a kid I thought 3.5in floppies were a recent innovation.

[@Staren01]

I got my first computer around the same time 93/94. I knew that 3.5in drives weren't that new, but I didn't think they were that old either. I was 11 and the 5.5in floppy was still very common in the older school computers. 3.5in discs were the undisputed standard that you knew any current system would be able to read. Where I went to school a lot of classrooms were just starting to replace the Apple IIs with IBM compatibles that had 3.5in drives.

[@dfirth224]

1980s office computers used 8" floppy disks. Looked identical to 5.25" only larger. And they WERE floppy if you waved them like a sheet of paper.

[@paulgray1699]

@@dfirth224 Hard sectored

[@cericat]

@@Staren01 My school got their first Apple IIs (I believe the IIe specifically) in 1989 yes very late to the party but public schools, my first home computer had both 5.25" and 3.5" which was a trend for me throughout the past 30 years I still like to try to have working disk drives since there's still a lot of old media out there that needs backing up, pity newer boards often ditch the FDC so I need to look into alternatives since PCIe slots are such a dang premium still.

[@IrishCarney]

The computer industry moved so fast in the late 70s and 80s. Compared to then, it's been very stable for a long time now.

[@dereinzigeweg]

Boot up floopy seek on a 3.5" is still one of my favorite childhood sounds. Thank you Sony, thank you TT.

[@MeriaDuck]

And the dreaded seeking from 0 to 80 / head slamming on a bad disk still haunts me 😂. Or the slight incompatibility between mine and my friends, so it was🤞 to see if the shared documents survived the trip between us.

[@herrbonk3635]

While the 5 inch diskette drive seek sound is a favorite from my youth (not childhood).

[@parkerlreed]

Holy crap, that hardware reveal is gorgeous.

[@dimbulb23]

I must admit the 3741 at 1:09 was snazzy. I worked for IBM from '68 to '98... always in the field with the machines in our customer's businesses. I don't get very worked up when it comes to old iron. When you deal with all those generations of technology it is better not to linger on the past. It's better to embrace the changes and hold onto your hat. When I think back over those 30 years, I remember the people I worked with, the bugs I never fixed (usually software bugs) and the tough bugs I fixed that others couldn't. It wasn't about the hardware or software that was pretty but about trying to fix what was wrong with it.

[@NJRoadfan]

Awaiting the Jonos video. Never heard of them before! One rabbit hole I went down was to figure out the origin of the modern "half height" 3.5" floppy drive with integrated face plate.... aka the "standard" drives we all use today. Best I could pin it down, it was made by TEAC first in 1987. I think Epson was another contender here as well. Chinon came close, they were shipping the slightly taller drives with the Amiga 2000 in 1987. Keep in mind that IBM never originally sold drives in that style. The PS/2 had separate face plates (including the official 3.5" drives for the PC AT). Same goes with the early Amigas and the Atari ST. Apple had the fancy motorized eject drives and they never used face plates either, always preferring a molded slot in the computer's case.

[@nickwallette6201]

Woah woah... what do you know about official 3.5" drives for the AT? I've been trying to figure out if one ever existed, or if it's just a slew of aftermarket products trying to fill the void?

[@NJRoadfan]

@@nickwallette6201 Official IBM product. They used the 720k drives that were shipped in the PC Convertible with an adapter board. They offered kits for both the 5170 AT and earlier PC XT with matching face plates and fit a 5.25" half height drive bay.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@NJRoadfan Huh! Man I would love to see that. All I've ever seen is retrofits with the typical 3.5-to-5.25" conversion plate.

[@SobieRobie]

Dig deeper about this Jonos company. There is a big chance to meet people which were working for the company. I love the stories from S100 era. It's like learning about first pioneers ;)

[@St0rmcrash]

Awesome history video! I've read that the Amstrad CPC ended up using the 3 inch drives because they basically picked them up at a bargain after the Sony 3.5in disk won. Really hope the next video is about the Jonos!

[@imranahmad2733]

I remember the Amstrad PCW 8256 and the Sinclair Spectrum +3 had them aswell, the disks where pretty durable too compared to the 3.5" disks.

[@synthnerd4539]

I think Casio used them on a thing or two in the mid 80s as well in their foray into semi pro music gear. Although I always knew them as 2.8" QuikDisks?

[@k0mori_yt]

The Sega SC-3000 computer, released in 1983, also used 3-inch disks via the SF-7000 expansion device.

[@TheWeepingCorpse]

@@imranahmad2733 i was writting a speccy +3 game and discovered that disks formatted on an amstrad pcw 8256 would read and write much faster on the speccy than those formatted on a speccy, i never discovered why, the project was cancelled.

[@EgoShredder]

Yep and also in the other Amstrad owned model the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K +3. I wonder if TT will do an episode about those 3" disks?

[@damouze]

Very interesting video! I remember my dad getting our first PC. It came originally shipped with two 5.25" floppy drives, but one of them was soon replaced with a DSDD 3.5" drive and later on with even a DSHD floppy drive. Anyway, that PC was ultimately replaced by a new PC, a 486SX if I'm not mistaken and the PC was handed over to me. It continued to serve me well for a couple of years, until I replaced it with an AT from the same brand. By that time it not only had two floppy drives, but it had an "external" MFM/RLL (can't remember which) 20MB hard disk made by Olivetti, that would have fitted perfectly in one of the floppy drive slots, were it not for the fact that it had a tendency to get very hot. You could say that this was my very first adventure in PC modding ;-). I still use 3.5" floppy drives on a regular basis. But it's not really on a PC (although I have a PC with an LS-120 drive for data transfer purposes). Instead it's on an MSX. That MSX is so maxed out that it has more RAM and more storage than my original PC ever did...

[@tomahzo]

I thought this was well-documented history. Fascinating how stuff like this can become as exciting as some kind of crime drama ;D. It's like "WHO DUNNIT!? WHO MARKETED THE FIRST 3.5" FLOPPY DRIVE!?" . Crazy! Excellent video!

[@brentboswell1294]

In the 1980's, a hard drive more than doubled the price of a PC. It was common for computers to have dual disk drives, one for booting the computer up, and later holding the disk for the program being run, and the second one for holding your saved data. In the transition phase from 5.25" to 3.5", it was common to replace the B: drive with a 3.5" model, often with an adapter kit, that bridged the gap to allow it to fit in a half height 5.25" drive bay. When they started going into PC's, the drives had a Shugart data interface, but with a row of pins instead of the edge connectors that 5.25" and 8" drives used (there were, of course, adapters for this problem...). The IBM PC/XT/AT BIOS didn't really have a 3.5" option, which is another reason why the 3.5" drive was usually the B: drive (the only thing that you needed the BIOS for was booting the system-once it was booted, the operating system could bridge the gap once again). There was third-party software that you could run to tell the operating system the proper parameters for the B: drive to work properly and use the full capacity of the drive. Many IBM PC clones had 3.5" disk options in their BIOS, and shipped with a floppy controller that natively understood the 3.5" drives. The IBM PS/2 systems were the first IBM desktop systems designed for the 3.5" floppy.

[@IrishCarney]

Even the floppy disk drives hugely increased the price of a computer. That's why, especially in the early to mid 80s, going by cassette was a major option. The original IBM PC even had that as a starter option but it was basically never used; I think only a single diagnostic app ever came out on cassette.

[@edwardhasted3849]

Fascinating and thank you for all your sleuthing. We started selling ACT Apricot Pcs in September 1983 which had single or double floppies in the base (non-HD) models. From memory they were Sony units and the smaller height versions. Clearly ACT had been talking to Sony for some time...

[@blehblah9942]

Very interesting and informative, you should rename it to "Origins of the Save Game Icon" though, it would give you a quadrillion views from all those youngsters that never held one of these :P

[@MeriaDuck]

If you show one to such youngster, they ask if it is a 3d printed save icon 😂

[@static-san]

The very earliest IBM PC JX computers (only sold in Australia, NZ and Japan) had 40 track 3.5" floppies. But that was because the controller didn't know how to half-step the disk head! The disks were actually 720k disks.

[@joemelnick]

Thank you for the video. I purchased an Atari 520ST in 1985 with a 3.5" floppy drive, Definitely a step up from the 5.25" of the Apple II and the Cassette Tape Drive of the TI-99/4A.

[@thereallantesh]

Great video. You really went in depth with your research. I really enjoyed this one.

[@stevekristoff4365]

Very well researched. From someone who lived through all those years and used cassette, 8", 5.25", 3.5" (as well as 'enterprise' 3420, 3480/3490, and many others) I do not believe I ever even heard of Jonos which was/is interesting. Their market must have been targeted differently than the two 'worlds' I straddled (data centers/ large business and home / soho). So thanks for the bringing that small piece of history to my attention. :)

[@jimmywubs7381]

Great job, guy. I was honestly expecting this to be some half-assed KZbin documentary and I am glad I watched it to the end. Kudos to you on a job well done!

[@paulalmquist5683]

Well done. Having lived through several decades of computer history I find it quite interesting to learn details that I had not heard about when it happened.

[@mattnordsell9760]

It's always interesting how so many things have been innovated by Sony that we don't tend to think about. As you mentioned, they were the ones who developed the 3.5" floppy, they also worked with Philips to develop the CD, they developed the Beta tape that lost to the VHS tape, they were even the ones that created the Blu-ray. These are just a few that come to mind that we don't often associate with them.

[@Biomancer81]

Most of the time Sony likes to have their products end to end proprietary, and completely under their control, and so certain formats that they created, even if superior failed. This isnt always the case, as in this product or blu-ray, but you rarely think about Betamax, MemoryStick, or Minidisc.

[@juanignacioaschura9437]

If only Sony wasn't so inclined into making things proprietary, they would have been even far more influential

[@RebeccaTurner-ny1xx]

@@Biomancer81 And the Elcaset!

[@TassieLorenzo]

VHS is somehow derived from Sony's U-Matic tape system, isn't it? At least that's what Sony claimed on their advertising at the time. The slogan was something along the lines of "Betamax: We created the competition and now we've bettered it". Please correct me if I'm wrong or the slogan is just a sign of Sony hubris! There certainly seems to be nothing Sony likes more than to create a proprietary format!

[@IrishCarney]

Sony & Philips also co-developed the standard audio cassette. When it came time to develop a digital successor to that small enclosed portable analog format (like digital CDs replacing analog records) Sony & Philips disagreed on strategy. Philips, fearing format churn would alienate customers, wanted back compatibility with analog tapes, hence Digital Compact Cassette. Sony, fearing long fast-forward/rewind would alienate customers used to CDs, wanted instant access to any track; hence MiniDisc. The format war likely killed both.

[@the123king]

I have a machine that takes manual shutter disks. The RCA MS2000, which i believe dates from late 1982, or early 1983.

[@DarkFiber23]

Good historical research work, Shelby! This was a wonderful watch.

[@Papierzeit]

Nice video, well put together and then there were the 3-inch floppy disks I had used to these others in my childhood as well.

[@tomschmidt381]

Having used all three formats over the years thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[@GeoffreySwales]

This is a great video. All the additional research has definitely paid off. Well done!

[@LukeRichardson1981]

Great video. It's funny to me that the one that wasn't even floppy became the best known of all of the 'floppy' formats, so much so that it's still the default icon for 'Save' on computers 40 years after its introduction.

[@Raguleader]

The disk itself is still floppy, as you can see at a few points in the video. It's the protective cassette that isn't floppy. In contrast, a Hard Disk uses non-flexible platters instead of floppy media.

[@helldog3105]

This is really fascinating. I find it interesting that even in early episodes of The Computer Chronicles they talk about the ongoing transition from 5.25 disks to 3.5 disks. Since the show started in 1981, it shouldn't be a surprise, but it's interesting nonetheless. Cool history piece. I am curious to hear more about this Jonos Computers some time. I think I will start doing some digging of my own into them to see what I can see.

[@laurentitolledo1838]

love the sound of those floppy drives when reading from/writing data to the disk...

[@davechisholm9670]

Fun fact for the unwary - the early 3.5" floppy media were designed and manufactured with a round-ended pill capsule shaped window in the metal shutter for the moving R/W heads to operate through to contact the magnetic surface, which was soon altered to the normal rectangular window most people would be familiar with. You can see both types of shutter window in your video. The trap for the unwary, is that the head clearance in later 3.5" drives expects a rectangular window in the shutter, so if an old disk with the round-ended window is inserted in a later drive, the shutter will likely foul the heads and upon eject, damage them or even rip them out of the drive!

[@waynesharp1690]

I've got an old sharp word processor that uses a belt driven 3.5" floppy drive that uses 720k disks. The drive didn't work when I got it but I put a new belt on and it's working now.

[@TastyBusiness]

Fascinating, and well researched! I dig this format, and I totally want to see more of that Jonos Courier. Nicely done!

[@neildusting4114]

Having spent most of the 80's & early 90's manufacturing diskettes of all sizes this was a nice blast from the past.

[@__drew9576]

This is a really cool video. I think it would be cool to see a video going over every storage medium sony created as it feels like they have made a bunch.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Oh yah. Including audiovisual media too: U-matic videocassette, Betamax videocassette, Elcaset audio tape, Compact Disc (with Philips), 3½" floppy diskette, Betacam videocassette,* Video 8 (and later Hi-8) videocassette, Digital Audio Tape, MiniDisc, NT microcassette, PlayStation memory card, DV videocassette (with Panasonic and others), DVD (with multiple other companies), Memory Stick flash memory card, MicroMV videocassette... Let me know if I missed any! * smallest-size tapes are identical to Betamax, but the signal recorded on them is completely different

[@meatpockets]

Interestingly disk drives for the Apple II weren’t an option until 1978 and early adopters had to use a cassette. 1:31

[@1RandomToaster]

What I think is most impressive is that Sony can lay claim to the save icon, one of the few things to keep Keith Richards amused (alongside Twinkies and Cockroaches) after the end of days.

[@IraQNid]

Quite a bit more history to the origins than I realized. I grew up with the 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies. Everyone I knew called the 3.5 inch version the hard floppy disk. In school we used the 5.25 inch floppies to save our work. When I went to college they were still using the 5.25 inch floppy drives. By then I was using the 3.5 inch disks. So it made it possible to bring in my older 5.25 inch disks to backup the data to the newer standard. The iconic symbol for saving data to this day is still the 3.5 inch hard floppy disk.

[@DeetexSeraphine]

Why am I not surprised to learn that, this now industry standard format was originally conceived by Sony, because they wanted their own product for a Full Stack... Fascinating video, regardless!

[@leotide1990]

My feed offered me a true crime doc I was interested in, and one of your videos. Immediately clicked on you without hesitation. Always fascinating to learn computer history from the rabbit trails you seem to find yourself on, haha. Excellent research done, can’t wait to see the Jonos!

[@dancingwiththedogsdj]

Omg .. I forgot I would see "cassette" printed on the box or media quite frequently... Along with diskette... The drive mechanism in my Tandy 1000HX with a single 3 1/2" drive was so solid and satisfying. Not to mention, totally reliable over all the years. Just, clunk, read, done. Great video, just started watching... 🍻🌎❤️🎶🕺🏻💾🖥️

[@KenjiUmino]

Many manuals for NES, SNES etc... console games call the cartridge a cassette as well ... at least in the german translation

[@88porpoise]

They were "disc cassettes" with a hard plastic enclosure for a fragile storage medium, much like a tape cassette.

[@tarstarkusz]

Were these other Sony 3.5 disks also variable speed like the Mac? I don't know about the earliest mac drives, but later 800k Mac drives were variable speed.

[@BRBTechTalk]

Great research on this dead format. I knew Sony was a leader but never even heard of Jonos before this video. I have been buying, working on & fixing computers since the late '80s. I have seen formats come and go, however I do still have 3.5" floppies and CDs in my collection.

[@carlosbragatto]

What an AWESOME video, thanks for that, thanks for correcting the "common knowledge" of the HP being the first to use it. Now if we could get hold of someone from Jonos for an interview...

[@electrolyticmaster8396]

I have a boatload of 3.5" disks from days gone by. I have a USB external floppy drive as well as an internal drive on another PC. I also have a PC with two 3.5's that I used for duplicating copy protected disks. It has a Copy II PC hardware board. Surprisingly, disks that have been in cold storage for 20+ years still work. Just for giggles, I installed a late 90's copy of Quattro Pro Spreadsheet software from four 3.5's. It runs perfectly!

[@mymessylab]

What a great video! It has spread out a bright light onto a common device used by billions of people, without knowing it. The background history is fantastic. Thanks for sharing this.

[@saifal-badri]

Amazing work, thanks for documenting all of this, enjoyed every second

[@deawpolpichai612]

ย้อนรอย​ความทรงจําเลย​ครับ​ Floppy​ Disk​ เเผ่นนี้

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

Nice! The oldest 8" floppy drive I ever saw, had a cartridge in which you could lay the floppy, that is, without the hard plastic, and close the lid and insert it. I haven't seen that again even on youtube.

[@KenjiUmino]

The way you describe it, I imagine it being very similar to the CD caddy that some old CD-ROM drives used. I have an external apple scsi CD-ROM drive that loads a caddy instead of the slide out tray that was common on PC drives. I have some questions tho: Did these early 8" disks come "naked" without the wobbly plastic shell ? or did the 8" always have that shell and you needed to get the disk out for THIS specific caddy loading drive? And once you got the wobbly disk out of its soft plastic shell - which I imagine would damage that shell for good - how do you store it after use ? In a jewel case ?

[@DanielMReck]

Looking forward to that Jonos video. Thanks for your super deep dive on this!

[@insanelydigitalvids]

Superb research and a riveting presentation! Thanks 🙂

[@TJDunaway]

I don't know how youtube kept this from me this long. You always talk about cool stuff Shelby!

[@lmoore3rd]

I would love to know if Sony's original 3.5" drive design included motorized ejection (as an option) or was that something Apple requested of Sony to engineer for the Macintosh specifically. Early Mac Sony floppies also grabbed the disk upon insertion kinda like a VCR, that was later phased out to cut cost in the mid 90's.

[@MarkMalley]

It did not.

[@user-marco-S]

When i went to school in the begin '80 s, we had one classroom with some computers. One of them used 8" floppy's. I don't remember which system it was, but i think it was a computer with a terminal (the big unit did contain the floppy drive). If we had to do something on that system, we had to start loading binbasic first.

[@Petertronic]

Brilliant research! I've enjoyed seeing you work on the Jonos computer on the livestreams, can't wait for a video on it.

[@richardthunderbay8364]

A very interesting presentation. Thanks for posting.

[@Capt.Marco-Hawk-L.L.A.P]

Fantastic video well researched and put together, I didn't know about the Jonos system and very much looking forward to that video.

[@pdelong42]

First time here - those credits were amazing. I haven't heard that noise since I pulled an all-nighter in high-school to finish a report. I don't miss that printer one bit.

[@Vinpupx1]

Happy to see all those floppy disks you bought finally being shown off. Great video!

[@lorensims4846]

I first got seriously interested in personal computers in 1980, with subscriptions to Creative Computing, Byte and Infoworld. I closely followed the attempts to introduce the 3.5" "floppy." To my mind, it was the Macintosh that really settled the small disc standard. My wife called these "cookies, " and many of my friends who had worked with 8" and 5.25" floppies referred to these as "firmies." Mostly we all settled on the term "diskette." Those 8" floppies were truly floppy. The 5.25" ones were less so. I miss the diskettes. I still have a bunch of Zip disks and drives in the garage. Yeah, USB drives put an end to all of that, and software distributed on CD did as well. I do credit the iMac for first popularizing USB. Also, the Mac made CDs easy.

[@semuhphor]

Hi Shelby. I just found your channel, and I'm very impressed. Watch much of the first disk imaging video and .. well .. wow. Cool! I've been doing computer stuff since 1971 and it's a joy to discover a place that is just a treasure trove of information. Thanks.

[@mylittleparody2277]

Very interesting and well researched video! Thank you!

[@GameRetro]

This video and the amount of information in it IS OUTSTANDING! GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT!!!

[@deepsleep7822]

I miss Byte magazine. Ending credits: the sweet sound of the dot-matrix impact printer. Good job on the vid. I lived through the 3.5” era. Used 8” disks at work (we had IBM equipment).

[@admiralandersen]

This is a very interesting video. Thank you so much for thinking of it and making it. 😃 I have 5,25 for my Commodore SX 64 and 3,5 for my IBM ThinkPads. But also the iomega clik! Pocket Zip for the ThinkPads. I enjoy that specific storage medium a lot 😃

[@klaatubob]

It amazes me how many people back then and still today think that disk is a "hard disk" because of the hard case. And today, most people think of that disc as the "save" button.

[@bobingabout]

Most people when I was growing up had computers like the Commodore 64, but we had an Amstrad CPC 464. In the UK, these machines used almost exclusively, audio cassette tapes. The first Floppy Disk I encountered was the 3 Inch floppy. It was basically cassette tape sized. And like the cassette tape, you could turn them over and have something else on the other side. Which makes perfect sense for people who'd been previously using audio cassette tapes. Apparently, Alan Sugar, the person responsible for the Amstrad CPC was a bargain hunter, and purchased these 3 inch disk drives, because they were really cheap, because nobody seemed to want them. Every other computer I've seen either used 5 and a quarter inch disks, like the Commodore 64, or Acorn BBC, or went straight to the 3 and a half inch disk, like the Amiga.

[@esra_erimez]

Great documentary! I'm going to rewatch it with my dad. Thank you so much!

[@cliftonchurch6039]

Every time I see your shelves, my eyes are drawn to the You Don't Know Jack 5th Dementia box. It's the only YDKJ game not available in Jackbox Games' YDKJ Classic Pack on Steam, and was the only one from the early generation that had online play, which is likely the reason it's not included in the Classic Pack. It's also the only one I properly owned before getting the classic pack on Steam. It's a great version, and its scoring system is what built the framework for the modern YDKJ games in the Party Packs that revitalized the company.

[@danyoutube7491]

@2:06 I wonder what the capacity of a 90cm disk would have been :)

[@jon-paulfilkins7820]

I'm just that age where I entered work as the 5/14 inch floppy was phasing out and the 3 1/2 inch was coming in, to tell the difference between the two, the larger one was still a "floppy" and the smaller one because of its plastic case was a "stiffy". I was also involved in shuttiong down some sites and dealt with 8 inch discs and one site even still had a card index system.

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

I never expected a video about this topic but it was really interesting.

[@simonweel7971]

In 1984, we had them HP 150 with that dual 3.5 inch drive. And another HP 150 with a 10 or 15 MB harddrive. The next pc was to be a HP Vectra. No added type - just Vectra. It was a 'true' PC compatible machine. And as such, it had a 5¼ inch drive. And then we had a problem. Since there was no network, how to exchange data between those machines? As far as I know, there where no off-the-shelf 3.5 inch drives for pc's at that time. So we bought an external HP 3.5 inch drive. With a weird interface. Can't remember what is was called, but it used a very thin twin-wire, like you find on them beige ear pieces that came with the pocket transistor radio. Don't know how it was connected to the Vectra either, but anyway, that was the way to exchange data. And that external drive was sloooooooooooow. Did some searching, but can't find anything about that external drive?

[@needfuldoer4531]

A little more on the Apple connection: According to a story by Andy Hertzfeld, the Mac was originally supposed to use Apple's proprietary "Twiggy" 5.25" drives because traditional 5.25" disks couldn't hold the system software. (If you look at the metal frame inside a Mac 128k, 512k, or Plus, its front hole is big enough for a 5.25" disk and latching mechanism. In fact, at least two prototype Macs with Twiggy drives have surfaced over the years.) However, production yields of working drives were very low, so low they threatened the Lisa's launch date. George Crow, an engineer Apple hired from HP, was all-in on the Sony drives and showed one to Steve Jobs. Jobs loved the concept, but wanted Apple to develop their own 3.5" microfloppy drives. In less than a year. The Mac and disk drive teams started work on their own drive, but secretly kept working with Sony. (One time when a Sony engineer was visiting Apple, they had to hide in a closet while Jobs made a surprise visit.) Eventually the disk drive team had to admit it would take too long to make their own drive, and they had to come clean with the deception. Every retail Mac launched with a 400k, single sided Sony drive.

[@ReinaldoRauch]

That's a great one Shelby! Thanks to helping preserve computer history o/

[@koppadasao]

I'm barely old enough to have used 8" floppies. At 16 I worked at the local railroad station, and one of the thing they had me do was to take a backup of the ticket machine, which used 8" floppies. At home I was, of course, using 5.25" floppies with my C64 bought in Germany 4 years earlier.

[@kirkthejerk7258]

Great job on the thorough research.

[@jensschroder8214]

the Commodore Amiga implemented a 3 1/2 floppy drive with a Shugard bus. This differs from the slightly modified PC floppy bus. The floppy is configured on device 0 and not on device 1. The disk change signal is required for this. The Amiga writes 880kb to a DD disk as opposed to 720kb on the PC. Up to 4 disk drives are possible and there are no twisted cables. However, the IC Paula was only designed for DD disks and the data rate for HD is too high. That's why third-party manufacturers later offered additional floppy controllers that also support HD. These then saved 1.76 MB on a Sony 3 1/2 floppy disk.

[@PerMejdal]

When did 3.5” die? My laptop from 2002 had one. The first desktop PC I saw without, was in 2004. It came with a 16 MB USB stick as an replacement. I still had a 3.5” USB drive in my toolbox in 2009. Because I might needed it to boot a network install or do a BIOS update.

[@michaelhawthorne8696]

I remember back in 1984 (I think) I had a BBC Electron with the Plus 1 add on (Joy stick and ROM interface). Then I bought the Plus 2 add on (3.5" Floppy Disk Drive). It was amazing to see how fast it loaded either games or basic programs I saved to disk (compared to tape). The Plus 1 was £60 The Plus 2 was £199 The BBC Electron was £199 Connecting them all together (3 boxes) was easy and so solid with big bolts to secure everything....not the ridiculous "Blue Tack" offer to secure the ZX81 RAM Pack from Sir Clive Sinclair. When assembled, the machine looked awesome, I would have one today, just to drool over. The disk drive, I think was single sided single density... 180K ?...really not sure now but to watch it defrag using video RAM was quite satisfying.... the screen would fill with what looked like white noise but was pixels representing the individual bits stored on the disk.... I'm 60 now so I was around 21 when I had this..... them were the days. Great research by the way, this took me right back to the good ol' days Ending with what looked like an Epsom FX80 printer....the go to printer of the early eighties. Subbed and liked !

[@hicknopunk]

Do analog music on the 3.5" next ❤

[@mbwoods2001]

And that with the amiga having 880k formatted 3.5" disks as opposed to 720k as used in the pc's and atari st. Amiga could read 720k formatted disks with a special software.

[@davidhayward1426]

I find it interesting that in the various early articles on the 3.5 the reported formatted capacity was all over the place. Some reported capacities were much larger the 400K forMac and 360K for PCs that eventually shipped.

[@pakatvideos]

the research done was so extensive & it shows.

[@MarkMalley]

The date codes on a lot of the chips on the Jonos cards are from 1983, perhaps you have a later version. You have CP/M 3.0 running on the Jonos (also released in 1983), I'm curious if it shipped with 2.2. With the original Sony drive you needed to manually open the shutter on the disks you put in it. In the video you said you didn't know of a drive that needs the manual shutter, but then you open the shutter manually before putting it into the Jonos. (Early versions of the SMC-70 required the shutter to be manually opened). Did you need to do that to put the disk in the Jonos, or were you just demonstrating that you could lock it open before putting it in? I had heard that Sony offered an upgrade to early drives that didn't have the mechanism to open the shutter, but I haven't been able to verify this. Finally, as you noted, there was never a single density 3.5" disk released.

[@WelcomeToMarkintosh]

Wow-that was fascinating and very interesting-thank you!!

[@alexandruianu8432]

I would add that the Hitachi 3" CF2 disks are universal. The same media will work just fine formatted as SD or DD. Commercially, they only made single sided SD drives and double sided DD drives, so either 180K/side formatted, or 720K/disc formatted (like a QD 5 1/4" or DD 3 1/2").

[@captainkeyboard1007]

The disk console shown in the show was the IBM 3741. The IBM 3742 was the [dual] disk station that had two keyboards and floppy disk drives for two operators to use.

[@ByteMotel-be7vb]

Almost forgot, the second company I worked for much later developed a 3.5" floppy form factor device that was used to read SmartMedia memory into a PC. No moving parts, a coil in the device simulated floppy media pulses through the drive electronics that was captured by the drive read head and feed into a device driver in the floppy stack which allowed the the PC to present the disc to look much larger. Used initially by Olympus for the E-1 Digital Camera: One, if not the first, fully digital cameras. No shutter, viewfinder displayed exactly what the image detector would be saving to memory.

[@majorramsey3k]

If you open that thing up, it may have date stamps on the components, like a quality control sticker. I don't know if that would help.

[@GaugePlays1980]

I love it. Both informative and enthusiastic. As always thanks for the content!

[@bloepje]

It's funny that the first disk I saw was a 3" disk drive. And then came the amiga with 3.5" and the atari too. PC's kept using the 5.25" for a long time. At that time each country had their own history, because the UK was doing the BBC and the spectrum, and NL was doing commodore and a little spectrum. So in NL the 3.5" disks were mostly on home computers, and PC's and "high end" unix servers still had 5.25" (although unix servers usually had 1/4" tapes)

[@8bitghostnuts]

Just stellar, thanks for the history lesson ✨

[@pdpandion4931]

I think the C64 had a large part in keeping the 5.25 disks around for as long as they were. My first computer after C64 was a 286 Goldstar and it had a 3.5 drive. Also, I miss going thru the monthly Computer Shopper. That was like looking thru the old christmas catalogues.

[@pfcrow]

I was very annoyed that Atari refused to release a 3.5" drive for their 8-bit line; rumors are that they didn't want to detract from their ST line, which was IMHO stupid. Apparently Commodore released a 3.5" C64 drive in 1987. The Apple II eventually got 3.5" drives. It's a shame they didn't all get them in 1984.

[@MarianoLu]

16:15 There were such a synonymous of small files that even to this day the save icon is a 3.5 in floppy

[@mp-zf4ur]

Great rundown, thanks!

[@IrishCarney]

"Eight inch disks are massive, though" - only in retrospect. At the time, an ordinary audio record was 12 inches, and some 10 inch. The 45 rpm format, mostly used for hit singles, was 7 inches, not much smaller than the original floppies, and much bigger than the 5¼" floppies, let alone the 3½ inchers. And while some reel-to-reel or open reel tape, used by many large computers and by audiophiles, were 5 inches in diameter, they were usually 10½ or 7 inches. LaserDiscs (and their CED competition) were also 12 inches. People were used to formats in this size.