文档介绍：How Floppy Disk Drives Work
by Gary Brown
If you have spent any time at all working with puter, then
chances are good that you have used a floppy disk at some
point. The floppy disk drive (FDD) was the primary means of
adding data to puter until the CD-ROM drive became
popular. In fact, FDDs have been an ponent of most
puters for more than 20 years.
Basically, a floppy disk drive reads and writes data to a small,
circular piece of metal-coated plastic similar to audio cassette
tape. In this edition of How Stuff Works, you will learn more about what is inside a floppy disk
drive and how it works. You will also find out some cool facts about FDDs.
History of the Floppy Disk Drive
The floppy disk drive (FDD) was invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967. The first floppy drives
used an 8-inch disk (later called a "diskette" as it got smaller), which evolved into the -inch
disk that was used on the first IBM puter in August 1981. The -inch disk held
360 pared to the megabyte capacity of today's -inch diskette.
The -inch disks were dubbed "floppy" because the diskette packaging was a very flexible
plastic envelope, unlike the rigid case used to hold today's -inch diskettes.
By the mid-1980s, the improved designs of the read/write heads, along with improvements in the
ic recording media, led to the less-flexible, -inch, 1