We transfer your 3.5-inch floppy disks to accessible files on a USB or External Hard Drive.
Released in 1981, Sony’s 161.2kb magnetic disk wasn’t widely adopted by the market until 1982, when manufacturers agreed to standardize Sony’s design specifications, favouring it over the larger, superseded, 5 1/4" format.
Like its predecessors, the disk format served as a universal data medium in consumer and commercial applications. The 3.5" disk would differentiate itself, from its floppy predecessors, with a rigid plastic housing, and feature a metal slide-out shield that would draw back to reveal the magnetic recording surface during operation. This allowed for built-in disk protection, an improvement over the previous offerings that left a portion of the disk exposed.
During it’s lifespan, Apple’s use of Group Coded Recording, an encoding process used previously in 5 1/4-inch systems, would see the 3.5-inch data capacity increase to 400kb on their Macintosh computers. Later, further improvements would lead to a “High Density” variant that increased capacity potential to 1.44 MB.
Enduring through to the early 2000s, the format retains a visible place in contemporary computing, where the iconic design can often be found serving as a Save icon in much of today’s software.
