Production Glossary
Floppy Disk
The floppy disk is a means of storage for various types of media. The disk is comprised of a fine, circular magnetic film enclosed inside of a plastic sleeve. The first floppy disks, introduced in the 1970s, were quite large (8 inches). But, by the time the disks were available for consumers, the developers had reduced the size to 5.25 inches, which became the standard for quite sometime. These initial disks were capable of storing from 360 KB to 1.2 MB of information.The succeeding versions of the disk shrank in size but increased in storage capacity. The 3.5 inch disks came in a double sided version, for additional storage, with the original “floppy” plastic covers being replaced by hard plastic cases. Despite the fact that floppy disks are basically obsolete, there are some users who prefer to utilize them for backup copies of important data. However, desktops and laptops no longer offer hard disk drives, unless they are requested by the consumer.
