The floppy disk is the standard storage medium for today's microcomputers.
It is available in two common sizes, the 5.25 inch and the 3.5 inch. The 5.25 inch, popular for many years, is now in decline for the more robust and manageable 3.5 inch floppy.
This form of computer storage was first developed in 1950 by Dr Yoshiro Nakamatsu in Tokyo, he then licensed this new development to IBM, who made the format popular by incorporating it into its PC, the worlds best-selling computer.
The 3.5 inch floppy disk utilises a magnetic disk encased in a rigid plastic cover. When the disk is inserted into a disk drive a metal flap is slid back automatically to allow the read/write head to almost touch the surface of the rotating magnetic disk.
Information is stored on the disk as a sequence of 0's and 1's; the direction of magnetised particles indicating a 0 or a 1 state at any point on the disk. In many ways the floppy disk head writes and reads data in a similar fashion to a cassette tape recorder. When writing to the disk the drive head will magnetise particles in the correct direction and when reading them back it will magnetically detect their direction and generate the appropriate 0 or 1 to be passed to the computer.
The floppy disk by today's standards is capable of storing limited amounts of data and is considered very slow. Yhey are more often than not supplemented by hard disk drives which can hold much larger volumes of data and operate at up to 100 times the speed.
