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In
the foreground, two IBM 350 disk drives, each with a capacity of 3.75
MB and consisting of a stack of fifty two, 24 inch disks. Production
began in 1957. It wouldn't be possible to store even one photo from a
smartphone on such a drive and the capacity is a little over 2.5 times
the storage space of the 3 1/2" floppy disks that became available in
the late 1980s. Those disks replaced the earlier, lower capacity 5 1/4"
disks. (I used 8" floppy disks on a microprocessor development system.
This was the first format of portable floppy and became commercially
available in 1971).