Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk
Added 2023-10-21 02:34:14 +0000 UTC
This is another instance of this not being the video I set out to make. This was going to be a lame repair video about the 9121. But I thought "huh, it's be pretty cool to tease the video as being about the first 3.5in floppy drive in the US" because I assumed that the Sony SMC-70 was first but only in Japan. None of that turned out to be correct after just a little bit of research, but I wasn't really sure and kept unraveling threads...and now here we are on what I believe is the definitive order of significant events that lead to the the 3.5in floppy becoming common as well as answering my initial question about the first drive in a computer. And I bet no one here could guess what computer it was...
Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djsyVgTGaRk
Comments
It would certainly have helped, but floppy drives were optional for the first iteration of the MSX standard and they were shipped only with a very few MSX1 models by default. Even for the later MSX2 and MSX2+ and even the Turbo-R, floppy drives were an optional feature of the standard, althoug most computers of those MSX revisions did come with a floppy drive built-in.
Damouze
2023-10-21 07:05:36 +0000 UTCI've always held that Sony's position in the MSX market helped push their 3.5" disk along, but this was likely really only true in Japan — 5.25" and CFD/"QuickDisk" drives did exist for those systems as well, but were quickly dwarfed to the point that no one (or very negligibly few) seems to have released commercial MSX software for those. Not sure how true this is in practice though, even in Japan.
Pietro Gagliardi
2023-10-21 04:01:59 +0000 UTC
