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History of the floppy disk
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The first floppy disk drive
The commercially avaliable floppy disk drive was invented by a Memorex employee named Alan Shugart. It used an 8-inch read-write disk that could hold up to 175 kilobytes of memory. Floppy Disks would later be referred to as diskettes as, they gradually decreased in physical size. -
The Mini disk drive
The first major leap in floppy technology was the invention of the 5.25 inch floppy drive, invented by Shugart in 1976. The first 5.25 inch "mini" disks could hold up to 110 KB of memory, and they were considerably cheaper than the current 8 inch disk standard. The most popular derivative of this technology was the 5.25 inch Dynamic Drive (DD), invented in 1978 -
The 5.25 inch HD
The 5.25 inch HD floppy drive was invented in 1982, and could a hold an astounding 1.2 megabytes of data. It was the highest capacity floppy drive to date. -
The 3.5 inch DS DD
As floppy drives continued to evolve, they continued to decrease in size. The 3.5 inch double sided double density format was the next major evolution of floppy drives after the 5.25 inch drive. This essentially gave consumers the option of either higher storage capacity or form factor convenience. The 3.5 inch DSDD was invented in 1984, and could hold around 720 KB of data. There were 3 inch floppy drives, but their storage capacity was so low nobody paid them much attention. -
The 3.5 inch HD
The high density 3.5 inch floppy drive was created in 1986, and had a storage capacity of 1.44 megabytes. -
The 3.5 inch ED
The 3.5 inch ED was the first of the floppy ZIP drives, which could hold more data than the original floppy drives. This one in particular could hold up to 2.88 megabytes. -
USB 1
The first of its kind, USB 1 is somewhat low-tech compared to today's standards, with Low Bandwidth data rates of 1.5 Megabits per second, and Full Bandwidth rates of 12 Megabits per second. Additionally, due to timing and power limitations, USB 1 doesn't support extension cables or pass-through monitors. -
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History of the USB drive.
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USB 1.1
While it retains the data speeds of its predecessor, the USB 1.1 differed from the USB 1 by fixing hub connectivity issues the latter suffered from. -
USB 2
USB 2 was a substantial improvement over the USB 1.1, as it was capable of achieving a maximum signal rate of 480 Megabits per second. Unfortunately, bus access constraints limit the effective throughput of this High Bandwidth signaling to 280 Megabits per second. -
USB 3
USB 3 uses the new (at the time) SuperSpeed transfer mode, which significantly enhanced the data signaling rate to 5 Gigabits per second.
