A look at the brilliant physical design and engineering of the 3.5" diskette.
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.
In 1967, at an IBM facility in San Jose (CA), work began on a drive that led to the world's first floppy disk and disk drive. It was introduced into the market in an 8-inch (20 cm) format in 1972.
The more conveniently sized 5¼-inch disks were introduced in 1976, and became almost universal on dedicated word processing systems and personal computers.
This format was more slowly replaced by the 3½-inch format, first introduced in 1982. There was a significant period where both were popular. A number of other variant sizes were introduced over time, with limited market success.
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.
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floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed, such as USB flash drives, memory cards, optical discs, and storage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.