When a 5Mb drive was big.

[zeitghost]

Walking Through 50 Years of Hard Disk Drive History - Data Storage - News & Reviews - eWeek.com

Proper engineering.

[Sysman]

I like this bit:

In 1976, Shugart Associates (later Shugart Technologies, then Seagate Technology) joined forces with Wang Laboratories to produce the first 5.25-inch floppy drive, which was used for years in early IBM and Apple personal computers. Why was the 5.25-inch disk size selected? Interesting story, as Jim Porter tells it: "Well, the guys from Schugart and Wang got together to discuss the project, and they went out to a bar one night for drinks. One of them looked at the cocktail napkin and said, 'That's looks like a good size for the disk we want to make.' So it made it into the instructions for Shugart back in the Bay Area to make a floppy disk drive the size of a cocktail napkin—5.25 inches square." All that for 218K capacity

And I have worked with Fujitsu Eagle drives (slide 13). If I remember correctly you could format them to look like 2 RM05 drives, might have been 3 with later models.

[Doggy Styles]

'That's looks like a good size for the disk we want to make.' So it made it into the instructions for Shugart back in the Bay Area to make a floppy disk drive the size of a cocktail napkin—5.25 inches square.

And I have worked with Fujitsu Eagle drives (slide 13). If I remember correctly you could format them to look like 2 RM05 drives, might have been 3 with later models.

I remember working with 8-inchers at some time or other. 1.2 megs I think.

[NickFitz]

I remember working with 8-inchers at some time or other. 1.2 megs I think.

I used a 6809-based system with 8″ floppies for a few days when I started working at a digital systems engineering place, purely to get up to speed with polyFORTH. (They only kept those boxes around because some customers had old systems from them with that hardware, and for sticking junior engineers on before they let them loose on real work.)

[Sysman]

I remember working with 8-inchers at some time or other. 1.2 megs I think.

The first disks I used were like these



which were 10MB and housed in a 19" cabinet

[cojak]

Our 1st PC had a 20mb drive.

It cost us £1400...

[mudskipper]

Our 1st PC had a 20mb drive.

It cost us £1400...

WSS. And 512K RAM.

[Ignis Fatuus]

WSS. And 512K RAM.

I got the full 640K - more than you'd ever need in real life.

[Doggy Styles]

Single sided single density 8" floppy: 250kbytes: 77 tracks, 26 sectors, 128 bytes/sector.

That seems to be engraved on my soul.

Double sided were 500k, but you needed a different disk drive to use them.

If you wanted to use SS & DS, you needed a special disk drive that had two index hole detectors.

Wonderful piece of design.

1.2M was the size of the HD 5.25" floppies on the AT.

PC XT used 320k DSDD disks, then 360k (extra sector).

Not sure if the PC used SSDD 160k disks.

Aha, my memory isn't as good as yours. It wasn't a PC though, it was a Tektronix 4xxx system we used occasionally for CAD.

[Lockhouse]

This was mine;



You can tell it's a French computer, that bloke only has one thing on his mind!