Historical Computer Engineering - Floppy Disks
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Floppy Disks

Areas of Application


The 5,25 inch disk

picture of a 5,25 inch drive
Exhibit number 102
5,25 inch drive
K 5601 / MFS 1.6

The 5,25 Inch Floppy Disk was further spread than the 8 inch one because of its smaller size and the cheaper costs for the drives. It was especially interesting for microcomputers and text processors, as those computers still did not have hard drives at that time. That fact made the floppy disk to one of the most important storage forms at that time. They had to be used to boot the computer and also to start applications or simply for sharing data between computers. Because of that high usage some computers had already 2 drives built in, so that the user did not have to change the floppies that much. They were supported by the common operation systems of CP/M, MS-Dos and PC-Dos. Microsoft Computers still reserve the letters A and B for floppy disk drives.