Posted by dj on Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 6:41am.
Those were referred to as "floppy disks" (although they weren't very floppy!) or diskettes. They were measured in inches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
Be sure to scroll down to the chart showing the different sizes, years used, formats, etc.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/F/floppy_disk.html
Drawings of the 5.25" and 3.5" are shown here, along with explanations.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/floppy-disk-drive.htm
My first two computers ran only on 5.25" diskettes -- program on one, data on the other. No hard drive.
Then my son installed a hard drive in place of one of the 5.25" drives, so I learned to put programs on the hard drive and use the diskettes for data.
Then he replaced the 5.25" with a 3.5" diskette -- the smaller ones held LOTS more data than the larger one did!
My next several computers had hard drives and one A drive (for 3.5" diskettes). One of them also had a zip drive -- http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/Z/ZIP.html -- for zip disks which held an amazing amount of data. I used those only for storage of photos!!
Now everything is on the hard drive, and I back data up to the separate back-up drive, which is simply an external hard drive. No more little diskettes. I use email attachments or "flash drives" if I want to transfer data from one computer to another.
Times do change.
8" drives were often for specifc instruments or application rather than for a PC. The computers attached to Mass spectrometers and ICPOES (a type of optical emission spectrometer) were two I came across that used these in the 1980s. They look like a scaled up version of a 5 1/4" disk.
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