Early 3.5" Floppy Drives

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: Yes, but with a 500K data transfer rate, giving the same "720K" for DS. Shugart Associates. Alan Shugart started Shugart Associates, and produced floppy drives. Then he sold the company to Xerox? Then he started a new company, "Shugart Technology" and produced hard drives. Xerox's lawyers pointed out that they had bought the name "Shugart", so he renamed Shugart Technologies to "Seagate". Moral: don't name your company after yourself, or you could lose ownership of your name when you sell. The earliest Shugart 3.5" diskettes did not have a shutter. Later diskettes had a shutter that required manual opening, but had a spring to slam it shut when you "pinched" the corner. They had an arrow pointing to the correct "pinch" location. Some relatively modern "fully automatic shutter" disks still have that arrow! 'course most folk prob'ly think that it's to tell them which end of the disk to put into the drive. January 1986, PC-DOS 3.20 supported 720K 3.5". Later in 1986, PC-DOS 3.30 supported 1.4M. Q: Did IBM ever "catch up"? Q: when did Gavilan switch from 3" to 3.5"? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com