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Sunday 8 February 2015

Floppy Disk

The floppy disk was created by IBM in 1971, with its name derived from a magnetic disc enclosed in a flexible plastic envelope. Initial versions could hold about 175 kilobytes of data.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu, inventor of the floppy disk, believed lack of oxygen helped him think and nearly drowned himself coming up with ideas.

The disks shrank over time — from eight inches to 5.25 inches to 3.5 inches — then abruptly fell out of favor, most notably when the iMac was introduced without a disk drive in 1998.

In August 1997, a model of the Malaysian flag was completed, made out of 10,430 floppy disks. The country's deputy education minister described this as 'an event Malaysia can be proud of'.

Due to the limited technology of the 1980s, Tom Clancy's novel, The Hunt For Red October, had to be saved on ten floppy disks.

The system that controls U.S. nuclear arsenal was run on eight-inch floppy disks for around 50 years. The antiquated system finally got a long-awaited update in the summer of 2019.

Source New York Times

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