ABSTRACT
The hard-shell, 3.5-inch floppy disk has been established as the low rent digital transfer medium since it began to replace the 5 1/4-inch truly floppy disk in the early 1980s. Back in 1982, at the National Computer Conference in Houston, Texas, Sony showed its SMC 70 computer complete with two 3 1/2-inch floppy drives. At the same show, Matsushita introduced the compact floppy disk drive using a 3-inch version. The Sony disk provided considerably more data space by using a higher speed rotation combined with a more dense application of magnetic media on the surface. Introducing a new disk format that would make obsolete every drive system in use was a touchy situation. Most software applications are provided on stacks of floppy disks, but the graphic density of many of today's programs requires the use of a compact disc-read only memory for complete transfer.
