![]() Although some inexpensive home computers still regularly used cassette tape drives for storage until the mid-late 1980s, floppy drives became standard equipment for early business-oriented personal computers by the late 1970s. Steven StengelĬonsumer PC breakthroughs, such as Steve Wozniak’s Disk II system for the Apple II, brought floppy disk storage to the masses in the late 1970s. To improve reliability, the team placed the disc inside a plastic sleeve surrounded by fabric that could sweep away dust as the disc rotated.Īpple’s Disk II drives (1978) brought floppies to the mainstream in a big way. Noble came up with a rotating flexible plastic disc impregnated with iron oxide that could hold a magnetic charge similar to magnetic tape. Soon, an IBM engineering team led by David L. That led to a search, beginning in 1967, for a new removable storage medium that could retain information without power and could be transported easily to remote computer installation sites. ![]() The conventional solution required loading data from stacks of punched cards or spools of magnetic tape, which could be slow and bulky. As the mainframe computer industry began to use solid-state transistor memory that lost its contents when powered down, IBM found itself needing a way to quickly load system software into these new machines at boot to get them going. Throughout the 1960s, IBM shipped many mainframes with magnetic core memory, which could retain its contents when powered off.
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