ibm format floppy disk can be used on any computer

For older computers, the best way to load programs like Windows 3.0 was to use multiple disks to install the program. However, for high-density disks, it can store up to 730 KB.

It can store 730 KB on a double-density disk. 3½ DriveĪ 3 ½ floppy drive uses a magnetic floppy disk covered in plastic. This idea led to manufacturers producing double-sided drives which read both sides of the disk.

Sometimes, you could modify a 5¼ floppy disk to enable writing data on both sides. Additionally, this floppy disk can store from 360 KB to 1.2 MB of data. It became included in computers in the 1990s. Polaroid has an impressive recovery rate, but even they were unable to rescue data from the microwaved disk.A 5¼-inch floppy was quite common during the 1980s. His office has received disks that have been chewed by the family dog, submerged in water and even accidentally cooked in a microwave oven. If a Polaroid diskette goes bad, Whitebread`s office will try to recover the lost data. Whitebread is national operations manager of Polaroid`s Data Rescue Center in Oak Brook. Gretl Brown, a Washington computer consultant, tells of a government agency where it was common practice whenever a document was printed to staple the diskette to the printout.Īlan Whitebread has seen just about every imaginable kind of damaged diskette. A recent survey disclosed that as much as 70 percent of all diskette data loss is caused by nothing more unusual than fingerprints on the disk surface.īut some abuses are truly mind-boggling. But others are due to simple carelessness.

Other disasters, such as coffee spilled on a disk, are commonplace-and occasionally unavoidable. That was actually the student`s second mistake the first was neglecting to keep a back-up copy of the disk. When she returned, the disk was irreparably warped. One programming student at a local college tearfully told of the disastrous results of leaving a diskette with a semester`s worth of programs on the dashboard of her car while she stopped to visit a friend. Just about every experienced computer user has a diskette disaster story to relate. Most data losses involving diskettes usually occur because of the negligence of the user. The IBM PC formats 1/4-inch diskettes to 360K, while the Commodore Amiga formats its 3 1/2-inch diskettes to 800K. Storage capacity is measured in terms of the number of characters that can be stored, varying from a low of about 120,000 (120K) to a high of more than a million characters. The amount of information that can be stored on a disk depends on three factors: the computer, the disk itself and the disk drive.

Ibm format floppy disk can be used on any computer