It did, however, become the top-selling removable storage medium by 1988. The smaller disk wasn't as floppy as 8-inch and 5.25-inch diskettes because the 3.5-inch version came inside a hard plastic shell. The 3.5-inch floppy disk is the universal iconic symbol for saving your work for a reason. (Credit: René Ramos/Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images)
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You can still buy uber-expensive cartridge drives using the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) spec (Opens in a new window) for massive backup use-usually they’re found in enterprises (Opens in a new window), backing up servers full of important data. Unlike the floppy drive, however, tape has never gone away. Iomega gave it up and sold off the tape drive biz before the end of the decade. Third parties made proprietary tape-based drives for backup, such as Iomega and its Ditto drive (Opens in a new window) of the 1990s. And because tape was the cheapest storage available (Opens in a new window). Why include a port for tape at all? Some people wanted to run a version of BASIC called Cassette BASIC (Opens in a new window) that only worked off of tape, and DOS had no cassette tape support (DOS stood for Disk Operating System, after all).
IBM soon dropped the 5-pin DIN cassette port on its later systems, but it continued to sell the original 5150 right up through 1987 without a floppy drive if a customer preferred tape.
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But few developers sold PC software on tape because the computer almost always came with at least one floppy drive. A 90-minute cassette could hold about a megabyte of data.
The original IBM PC also had a port for one. Cassette recorders were available for home computers such as the Apple II and Commodore 64. In the 1980s, computer software was often sold on cassette tape, just like music albums. Magnetic tape isn't that far different from a floppy disk, although it's a lot slower when accessing stored data. (Credit: René Ramos/Dual Freq via Wikimedia Commons) The 5.25-inch floppy was fully ejected by 1994. Hard drives soon became the permanent, long-term data storage standard, and next-generation floppy disks would soon take over for portability, both of which we'll get to below. Back then, having two floppy drives made a huge difference because one of them could hold the operating system while the other drive loaded a program, such as Lotus 1-2-3 (Opens in a new window). The drives required a controller card on the motherboard and were connected with ribbon cables. Each floppy diskette could hold 160 kilobytes on one side, or 320KB if you could use both (not all disks were double-sided). The original IBM PC 5150 that debuted in August 1981 offered the option of one or two internal 5.25-inch floppy drives. Soon, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari adopted the same format. Steve Wozniak designed the first external Apple II disk drive in 1978 it used a 5.25-inch floppy disk. The eight-inch size didn't stick around for very long. The round disk inside was in a permanent flexible (floppy) jacket to keep fingers off. Floppy disks originally came in a size of 203.2mm, which is close enough to 8 inches for that to be the moniker used. IBM created the floppy drive as a means of read-only magnetic storage in 1972. A 5.25-inch floppy drive from an original IBM PC
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