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In 1980, the 3.5 inch floppy drive and
disc was introduced by Sony. Three major types of 3.5 inch floppy discs were developed;
double density with 720K, high density with 1.44MB, and extra-high denisty with 2.88MB. In
1986 the 720K double density drive first appeared in an IBM system with the IBM
Convertible laptop system. Because of it’s low capacity this standard did not catch
on. The next 3.5 floppy was the 1.44MB high density drive that first appeared from IBM in
the PS/2 product line in 1987. Also in 1987 Toshiba announced the 2.88MB floppy drive and
manufactoring began in 1989. IBM adopted these drives in 1991 and because the 2.88MB drive
can fully read and write 1.44M and 720K disks, the change was easy. Virtually all systems
today have built in support for the 2.88MB drives. Although the 2.88MB drives themselves
are not much more expensive than the 1.44MB drives they replace, the disk media is
currently still very expensive. The 1.44MB floppy disks cost approximinately 50 cents each
while the 2.88MB floppy disks cost more than 2 dollars each. For this reason the 2.88MB
floppy never really caught on and the 1.44MB floppy became the industy standard. next |