Looks like I was successful in convincing one of the editors to 
agree to the removal of a sentence in the  "floppy disk" article 
where someone stated that the reason the 3 1/2 inch floppy disk 
was not marketed as 90 mm was because the public "was not 
ready"  for a metric sized disk.  

Given the fact that the public was "ready"  for 35 mm film and 2 liter 
soda bottles, they would have been ready for 90 mm disks, if they 
had been given metric names from the start.  

They agreed that the decision to use an ifp designation was to 
emphasize that it was smaller than the 5 1/4 inch disk, which was
the standard storage device on home computers up to that time.
Plus the first widely marketed computer with a 3 1/2 floppy drive 
was the Macintosh, made by an American company.

If the disks had been given metric identities from the start, then 
that's how they would known today, most likely.

Stephen Gallagher

Reply via email to