Diskets

Diskets are a family of flexible magnetic storage disks used to store and transfer computer data. They were read by floppy disk drives and were widely used from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Diskets came in several sizes, notably 8-inch, 5.25-inch, and 3.5-inch formats, each with different housing and recording densities.

Construction and formats: The disk consists of a thin magnetic disk coated with iron oxide, mounted inside a protective plastic jacket. Older sizes like 8-inch and 5.25-inch used more open designs, while the 3.5-inch format adopted a rigid shell with a sliding metal shutter to protect the disk surface. Data was written to and read from concentric tracks by read/write heads inside the drive.

Capacities and densities: Capacities varied by format and density. 8-inch disks typically held from a few hundred kilobytes up to about 1.2 MB per side. 5.25-inch disks ranged from roughly 160 KB to 1.2 MB, with high-density versions becoming common. 3.5-inch disks commonly provided 1.44 MB of storage, and later extended-density variants offered up to about 2.88 MB, though the latter were uncommon.

Usage and decline: Floppies were used to load operating systems, applications, and data, and were a standard means of software distribution in many 1980s PCs. They were gradually supplanted by optical discs and, later, USB flash drives and cloud storage. Production of new drives declined in the 2000s, and diskets are now largely obsolete, though they remain of interest for historical computing and data recovery from legacy systems.