On 07/20/2017 10:42 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote: > Eric said: >> I think Shugart settled on 5.25" for the size of a minifloppy at least a >> year, and more likely two years, before Steve Jobs would have visited. I >> don't have proof, but SA400 public intro was in 1976, and they probably >> took more than a year of development to get to that point. > > For interest there's an SA-400 announcement article on page 86 of BYTE, > December 1976: > https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1976-12
Others followed quickly. I think Micropolis was sampling their 100 tpi drive in 1977 according to my memory. The first ones were pretty buggy, with an ugly tendency to wrinkle the annulus of the diskette. Apparently they weren't the only ones, as Dysan started to add a reinforcing ring to their 5.25 floppies. Micropolis eventually solved the problem by detecting when the drive door was being closed and running the spindle motor until the door was fully closed. --Chuck
