Floppy Disk

A floppy disk is a type of disk storage made from a thin, flexible disk coated with a magnetic storage medium and enclosed in a plastic shell. IBM introduced the first floppy disks, an 8-inch format, in 1971; Shugart Associates introduced the smaller 5 1/4-inch version in 1976, and the 3 1/2-inch format became the dominant standard by the late 1980s. Floppy disks became the ubiquitous means of storing and transferring computer data through the late 20th century, so pervasive that their image is still used as the save icon in much modern software, before being superseded by USB flash drives, memory cards and cloud storage.