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What years did the 8-inch, 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy diskettes die?

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punchy71

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Greetings,

Any idea what year the 8-inch, 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy diskettes died (respectively by year?).

As far as I know, 8-inch floppies were never used in the home environment. Although I may be wrong. Anyone know differently? :) IMHO, I think 8-inch floppies are the ideal sized storage medium (physically wise.. not necessarily capacity wise...). ;)

Thanks
 
I had 8" drives on the computer in my home in 1978. Admittedly, my setup was a bit unconventional. The dual drive enclosure was about the same size as many current full size towers and weighed about 50 pounds. Power draw was high and the tabs for writing often fell off (sometimes jamming the read/write heads). I do miss the clunk from closing the 8" drive door.

End of widespread mass production of floppy models:
2010 for 3.5"
About 1995 for 5.25"
Back when I did research on this topic, it seemed several manufacturers ceased production of 8" drives in 1985 but a small trickle of new drives continued being available through the early 90s and it looks like new 8" floppies are still being made. Well, a batch every few years anyway.
 
They didn't magically drop dead on some specific date. There will probably be some legacy 3.5" floppy disk systems chugging away out there until the sun goes supernova.

It is probably more useful to look at it the other way around: when did their successor become more popular?

The early home computers such as the TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Apple II popularized the 5.25" disk, and the IBM PC really made 360k drives a standard (so much so that higher capacity 96 TPI 5.25" drives were considered unusably non-standard). So I would say by 82 or 83 it was clear that 5.25" disks were the way to go.

3.5" formats didn't really seem to catch on until around 88 or so, despite many early adopters such as the Macintosh. For a time the high density 5.25" offered more storage than a single density 3.5" disk, but when the 1.44mb versions came out they suddenly looked a lot more convenient, especially for laptops. The IBM PS/2s probably helped popularize it. The interoperability issues between 360k and 1.2mb 5.25" formats probably also helped fuel the conversion to 1.44mb.

The 1.44mb format stuck around for along time despite efforts to improve on it. 2.88mb drives, Iomega Zip drives, LS-120 drives, somehow all failed to replace it.

USB was really meant to just be an interface plug for whatever removable disk drive device came next. But somewhere someone got the idea to just plop some flash ram in to a small USB device - no easily damaged moving parts - and bypass the issue of having "drives" and "disks". I seem to recall those really catching on around 2005 or so when they became wildly inexpensive.

Still, 3.5" floppy drive stuck around for a while longer because many BIOSes did not know how to boot from USB.
 
One thing about the 8" floppies that kept them in use in industrial equipment was that they're pretty much indestructible. I've retrieved data from 8" floppies that are 40+ years old. There was another type of 8" floppy as well--the Memorex 650 type--it had sector holes on the outer edge of the disk and a locator notch in the jacket. Very uncommon.
 
punchy71 said:
As far as I know, 8-inch floppies were never used in the home environment. Although I may be wrong. Anyone know differently? :)
Click to expand...

Although it was before my time, I do know many of the early personal computers used 8-inch floppy drives such as the Altair 8800, SWTPC 6809, Sol-20, and PolyMorphic Systems 8813. These were all 70s computers.
 
Yeah, it was my impression that 8" floppies were not uncommon as primary storage on mid- to late-'70s hobbyist micros (at least with higher-end setups) - but I wasn't around for them days, so I can't say for sure.
 
In my day job, I still occasionally used 3.5" floppies! We have older test equipment around from the era when 1.44M floppies were the standard, so I occasionally need to save a screen shot to a floppy on the test equipment and then load it up with a USB floppy drive. You don't throw away a $50k+ network analyzer just because it has a floppy drive!
 
punchy71 said:
As far as I know, 8-inch floppies were never used in the home environment. Although I may be wrong. Anyone know differently? :) IMHO, I think 8-inch floppies are the ideal sized storage medium (physically wise.. not necessarily capacity wise...). ;)
Click to expand...

Ever hear of the NEC APC?

Introduced at about the same time and for about the same price as the IBM PC. There are a few folks on this list who have them.
There's also the TRS-80 Model II, though some may say that it's more of a commercial machine.

About sizes--the NEC machines (APC, PC98...) used 8", 5.25" and 3.5" media, which all were identical in format and capacity.
 
Chuck(G) said:
There's also the TRS-80 Model II, though some may say that it's more of a commercial machine.
Click to expand...

And also the models 12, 16 and 6000. They were primarily business machines, but I did know one guy in high school who had a model II at home.
 
I am pretty sure you will still find floppies in use in "newish" equipment. So I recently had an eye test and the peripheral vision tester uses a PC with a floppy disk drive. In terms of PC's then I normally work with servers and the IBM x3NN series machines generally came with floppy disks, that's well into the 21st century, and we still have a few running...

You can see from this announcement letter these were still available in 2007..

http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/Sh...S106-558/index.html&lang=en&request_locale=en

with floppy drives....
 
NF6X said:
And also the models 12, 16 and 6000. They were primarily business machines, but I did know one guy in high school who had a model II at home.
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Sure, but all basically built on the Model II chassis--all will run Model II code, where none of the other TRS80 (e.g. I, III, IV) will. I've got a Model 16 myself with two half-height 8" drives. Personally, I think it's a piece of badly-designed flimsy junk for a business computer, but I am also aware that some fanboys think differently.
 
Rooting around in my various TRS-80 machines doesn't give me the impression that their industrial design was best-in-class for the day.
 
None of the drive types will be "dead" until parts are no longer obtainable, and disks are no longer manufactured. Gotta remember, there are still parts of the world that still roll with 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, due to not being caught up with the rest of us. Obsolete by our standards, very much so, however still in wide use in some area, definitely. Besides, I encountered a strange quad 5.25" setup on a job last week. Never bothered to ask what it was for, looked nifty, and brand new.
 
8" floppies are not dead, if you don't restrict yourself to just 'home computers' (although with the vintage craze that is a very variable phrase!). The US military still uses them at nuclear missile silos (even though it's already been posted in another thread here, here is the link to a UPI story about the 60 minutes video: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/05/01/US-nuclear-arsenal-still-controlled-by-floppy-disks/7491398973668/. And yes, Virginia, those are double-sided 8" disks they're using......).

As far as today's Wintel boxes, many no longer even have floppy controllers.
 
Some personal computers used 8-inch floppies, but home computers never did. The home market used cassettes until 5-1/4" floppies became affordable -- which took a lot longer in Europe than in the USA, to such an extent that British home computers pretty much skipped right over 5-1/4" floppies during the '80s and went straight from cassettes to 3" or 3-1/2" disks.
 
8" floppy drives and related controllers were offered by a number of third parties for many home computers. For a while in the early 80s, 8" floppy drives and 5.25" floppy drives were about the same price. Many more drives wound up hooked to home systems after the early systems got discarded at work.
 
krebizfan said:
8" floppy drives and related controllers were offered by a number of third parties for many home computers. For a while in the early 80s, 8" floppy drives and 5.25" floppy drives were about the same price. Many more drives wound up hooked to home systems after the early systems got discarded at work.
Click to expand...

Hobbyists would do that, but not Joe and Jane Q. Public using their VIC-20 or Atari 400 or TI-99/4A. :)

And besides the fact, most 8-inch floppy formats offered far more storage capacity than any ≤64K 8-bit system really needed for home use. Most programs that people used in the early '80s didn't even fill up a ~140K 5-1/4" disk.
 
I think some refinement of terms is needed here.

I view a "personal computer" as the idea of "one computer per user", as opposed to a mini- or a mainframe that hosts several users, each with their private allotment of file space. So a say, Molecular CP/M box of 1981 would not be a personal computer, regardless of the fact that it used Z80 cpus. It was a box made to host several users on terminals.

A "home computer" is an interesting concept. I knew of people who were using 8" drives during the 1970s on all manner of S100-type boxes for home use. Even more pervasive was the use of such hardware on home small business use.

Then there are "entertainment computers"--the Atari 400 and 800, TI 99/4s, etc. The attraction there seemed to be the ability to play games or run educational applications for the kids. Fun, but not something you wanted to keep your company's books on.

Lines, of course, could be crossed. The Apple II was probably best known during the 70s as a school computer--Apple sold tons of them to schools. I've got an 8" floppy here in my archives that was written using an Apple II with third-party hardware.

I cited the NEC APC--certainly a "personal" computer, and if you can view the IBM 5160 as a home computer, certainly also a home computer, 8" drives and all.
 
I think the easiest way to categorize it is that a home computer could be bought in a department store, mass-market electronics/appliance store, or toy store -- as opposed to only at a computer store or by mail order. Could you buy an IBM PC or XT at, say, Sears, or just the PCjr? I'm too young to remember, but I definitely remember when IBM had their big push to sell the PS/1 line at Sears, alongside the Macintosh Classic, the first Mac to sell for under $1000.
 
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