The floppy disk, introduced yet again by IBM, was first seen along with its floppy disk drive in 1971. Although mainframe computers back then already had hard drives and magnetic tape storage media, there was the need for a simple and cheaper means of saving and passing on software and instructions to the mainframes, previously done using the much slower punch cards.

At the core of the floppy disk was a small magnetic disk which, although far more portable than magnetic tape storage and hard disk drives at the time, stored much less than other media we've mentioned.