Floppy Disk Nədir

A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy or a diskette) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device.

The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM, had a disk diameter of 8 inches (203.2 mm).[1] Subsequently, the 5-inch and then the 3-inch became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century.[2] 3-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks.

Floppy Disk Ndir

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Floppy disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continue to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into the 21st century, as a form of skeuomorphic design. While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed, such as USB flash drives, memory cards, optical discs, and storage available through local computer networks and cloud storage.

The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter;[1][2] they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and both drives and disks were then sold separately starting in 1972 by Memorex and others.[3] These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation.[4] The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970,[5] and although IBM announced its first media as the Type 1 Diskette in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".

In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the 5-inch FDD. By 1978, there were more than ten manufacturers producing such FDDs.[6] There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as differential Manchester encoding (DM), modified frequency modulation (MFM), M2FM and group coded recording (GCR). The 5-inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most uses, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the 5-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB (368,640 bytes) for the Double-Sided Double-Density (DSDD) format using MFM encoding. In 1984, IBM introduced with its PC/AT the 1.2 MB (1,228,800 bytes) dual-sided 5-inch floppy disk, but it never became very popular. IBM started using the 720 KB double density 3-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and the 1.44 MB high-density version with the IBM Personal System/2 (PS/2) line in 1987. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988, Y-E Data introduced a drive for 2.88 MB Double-Sided Extended-Density (DSED) diskettes which was used by IBM in its top-of-the-line PS/2 and some RS/6000 models and in the second-generation NeXTcube and NeXTstation; however, this format had limited market success due to lack of standards and movement to 1.44 MB drives.[7]

Throughout the early 1980s, limits of the 5-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be more practical than the 8-inch format, it was becoming considered too large; as the quality of recording media grew, data could be stored in a smaller area.[8] Several solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, 2-, 3-, 3-,[9] 3- and 4-inches (and Sony's 90 mm 94 mm (3.54 in 3.70 in) disk) offered by various companies.[8] They all had several advantages over the old format, including a rigid case with a sliding metal (or later, sometimes plastic) shutter over the head slot, which helped protect the delicate magnetic medium from dust and damage, and a sliding write protection tab, which was far more convenient than the adhesive tabs used with earlier disks. The large market share of the well-established 5-inch format made it difficult for these diverse mutually-incompatible new formats to gain significant market share.[8] A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1983 by many manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By 1988, the 3-inch was outselling the 5-inch.[10]

By the end of the 1980s, 5-inch disks had been superseded by 3-inch disks. During this time, PCs frequently came equipped with drives of both sizes. By the mid-1990s, 5-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. The advantages of the 3-inch disk were its higher capacity, its smaller physical size, and its rigid case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks.

Floppy disks became commonplace during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups. Before hard disks became affordable to the general population,[nb 1] floppy disks were often used to store a computer's operating system (OS). Most home computers from that time have an elementary OS and BASIC stored in read-only memory (ROM), with the option of loading a more advanced OS from a floppy disk.

By the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use.[11] Then, distribution of larger packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs, and online distribution.

An attempt to enhance the existing 3-inch designs was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, using very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 MB[12] and backward-compatibility with standard 3-inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy-disk products, although ultimately recordable CDs/DVDs, solid-state flash storage, and eventually cloud-based online storage would render all these removable disk formats obsolete. External USB-based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives.

In the mid-1990s, mechanically incompatible higher-density floppy disks were introduced, like the Iomega Zip disk. Adoption was limited by the competition between proprietary formats and the need to buy expensive drives for computers where the disks would be used. In some cases, failure in market penetration was exacerbated by the release of higher-capacity versions of the drive and media being not backward-compatible with the original drives, dividing the users between new and old adopters. Consumers were wary of making costly investments into unproven and rapidly changing technologies, so none of the technologies became the established standard.

Flash-based USB-thumb drives finally were a practical and popular replacement, that supported traditional file systems and all common usage scenarios of floppy disks. As opposed to other solutions, no new drive type or special software was required that impeded adoption, since all that was necessary was an already common USB port.

By 2002, most manufacturers still provided floppy disk drives as standard equipment to meet user demand for file-transfer and an emergency boot device, as well as for the general secure feeling of having the familiar device.[13] By this time, the retail cost of a floppy drive had fallen to around $20 (equivalent to $33 in 2022), so there was little financial incentive to omit the device from a system. Subsequently, enabled by the widespread support for USB flash drives and BIOS boot, manufacturers and retailers progressively reduced the availability of floppy disk drives as standard equipment. In February 2003, Dell, one of the leading personal computer vendors, announced that floppy drives would no longer be pre-installed on Dell Dimension home computers, although they were still available as a selectable option and purchasable as an aftermarket OEM add-on.[14] By January 2007, only 2% of computers sold in stores contained built-in floppy disk drives.[15]

Floppy disks are used for emergency boots in aging systems lacking support for other bootable media and for BIOS updates, since most BIOS and firmware programs can still be executed from bootable floppy disks. If BIOS updates fail or become corrupt, floppy drives can sometimes be used to perform a recovery. The music and theatre industries still use equipment requiring standard floppy disks (e.g. synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, and lighting consoles). Industrial automation equipment such as programmable machinery and industrial robots may not have a USB interface; data and programs are then loaded from disks, damageable in industrial environments. This equipment may not be replaced due to cost or requirement for continuous availability; existing software emulation and virtualization do not solve this problem because a customized operating system is used that has no drivers for USB devices. Hardware floppy disk emulators can be made to interface floppy-disk controllers to a USB port that can be used for flash drives.

In May 2016, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within federal agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy disks are still used to coordinate "the operational functions of the United States' nuclear forces". The government planned to update some of the technology by the end of the 2017 fiscal year.[16][17] 2351a5e196