23 Aug
2018
23 Aug
'18
12:37 p.m.
On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 12:43 PM, Tom Gardner via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Well it all depends upon what u mean by
"first"
The Sony drive and cartridge were not compatible in many ways with what
became the physical, magnetic and electrical interface standards for the
3.5-inch drive and cartridge. The standards came out of the "Microfloppy
Industry Committee" (Google it with quotes) organized by Shugart Corp.
Either Shugart or Tandon was the first to ship drives compatible to the
standard. Tandon probably did the first such cartridge.
The original Sony drive and cartridge died out and Sony didn't come out
with
a compatible set until well after Shugart and Tandon. The early adopters
of
the Sony design like HP then changed to the industry standard design.
AFAICT, the only difference was that the pre-standard Sony 3.5-inch
diskettes had a manually operated shutter. The manual shutter and automatic
shutter 3.5-inch diskettes are interchangeable with some care.
For a while, diskettes were sold that had the automatic shutter, but also
had a way the user could latch the shutter open, so that they could be used
in early drives that didn't have the pin to open the automatic shutter.
I only ever saw the manual-shutter drives in Sony and HP equipment, though
I wouldn't be surprised if there were some other uses.