• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Did anyone release software, updates of patches commercially on 2.88MB floppy?

I wonder if the fact that it was based on barium ferrite made them unattractive to software companies.
 
It did make them quite a bit more expensive--and many firms with duplication facilities were not prepared for them. I think I have a sample somewhere from a firm in the Netherlands that made it an option, but in general no, 2.88M was unable to compete in the mass market.
 
Being able to easily retool facilities to mass produce disks didn't help the Tabor 3.25" disk any.

I thought the 2.88MB design was a victim of bad timing. It was released just as the integrated floppy controllers became common but those controllers were high density. Convincing someone to buy a controller and a drive to use expensive disks that can't be exchanged with anyone would have been a marketing challenge. The estimated 3 million 2.88MB drives was a good result.
 
I submit that the popularity of 1.44M drives was mostly due to the obsolescence of the 5.25" floppies and the inclusion of 3.5" drives on commodity PCs. The 3.25" drives did have the disadvantage of single-source media (I think Dysan was the only producer) and the powerful influence of Sony, HP and IBM. I believe that Dysan bet the bank on the format and lost heavily.
 
You can likely thank IBM for shipping the 3.5" drive as the default in the PS/2 for cementing it as the PC standard. Not like it needed much help at the point as the Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga already established the format. Built-in controllers weren't a problem for 2.88MB drives. Most every motherboard with integrated I/O appears to support the drives, but the drives themselves are rare.
 
The 3.5" drive had beat out the other competitors before the PS/2 showed up. The Convertible and JX were what broke the logjam on choosing the single standard drive.

Toshiba started shippeing the 2.88MB drives in 1990 but the Intel FDC that supported those didn't arrive until 1991. I think the PS/2 models with 2.88MB drives were also in 1991. How many compatible controllers were installed in systems before manufacture of 2.88MB drives ended? It didn't help much that late era Pentium systems had controllers supporting 2.88MB drives since the drives would have had to be pulled out of junked machines.
 
david__schmidt said:
OS/2 was only ever delivered on 1.44MB disks (and CDs); the post-4.0 convenience packs were delivered via bootable CD images. There were definitely some X-series IBM machines delivered with 2.88-capable floppy drives, though.
Click to expand...
That's inaccurate as I have OS/2 on 2.88 MB Disks from IBM.
 
njroadfan said:
In terms of disks I've acquired over the years, I've yet to get a 1.2MB HD 5.25" floppy. Even during my years of servicing computers, I've yet to come across anyone using them. Same goes for 2.88MB, but the drives were never widespread outside of IBM and NeXT shipping them OEM on their machines.
Click to expand...
Games were generally found on 1.2MB disks. KQ V comes to mind. Also MS-DOS 6.xx and MAybe 5.xx were also available on 1.2MB FDD (although more 3.5" units were shipped). Heck I even have MS-DOS 6.22 on 360KB disks from MS (had to fill out a form and send them out.
 
The Windows products I have tended to be on 1.2 MB disks including Windows 2 and 3 and the various components that made up Office plus Visual Basic and Visual C. Amusingly, the 3.5" offer for Visual Basic was on DD disks which seems a bit odd since all the systems that could run Visual Basic had high density controllers. Were there that many machines with 286+ processors but only 720K 3.5" drives?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top