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114-426: In 1986, three judges at The Computer Museum, Boston – Apple II designer and Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak , early MITS employee and PC World publisher David Bunnell , and the museum's associate director and curator Oliver Strimpel – awarded the title of "first personal computer using a microprocessor " to the 1973 Micral. The Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on

228-568: A backplane bus , called the Pluribus with 74-pin connector. 14 boards could be plugged in a Pluribus. With two Pluribus, the Micral N could support up to 24 boards. The computer used MOS memory instead of core memory . The Micral N could support parallel and serial input/output . It had 8 levels of interrupt and a stack . The computer was programmed with punched tape , and used a teleprinter or modem for I/O. The front panel console

342-410: A disk ) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when

456-660: A French immigrant from Vietnam , asked Frenchman François Gernelle to develop the Micral N computer for the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), starting in June 1972. Alain Perrier of INRA was looking for a computer for process control in his crop evapotranspiration measurements. The software was developed by Benchetrit. Beckmann designed the I/O boards and controllers for peripheral magnetic storage. Lacombe

570-465: A PDP-1 and (more reliably) on a PC. Realistic image synthesis Synthetic lighting and shading algorithms for models of three-dimensional objects have classically been tested by rendering of a teapot. In the early 1970s, Martin Newell, working at The University of Utah, decided to use his teapot as an object with which to test various modeling, lighting and shading techniques. In the summer of 1982, at

684-564: A Sinclair ZX80. To the nascent historical software collection, the first BASIC written for the Altair and VisiCalc Beta Test Version 0.1 was added. Between Fall 1995 and Spring 1996, The museum sponsored the Early Model Personal Computer Contest. A call for the earliest personal computers netted 137 additions to the collections. The judges, Steve Wozniak, David Bunnell, and Oliver Strimpel awarded prizes for

798-516: A Virtual Reality Chair among other interactive stations focusing on graphics. The other areas addressed writing, making sound, calculating, playing games, exploring information, and sharing ideas. Against a backdrop of the explosive growth of the Internet, this 4,000-square-foot exhibit addressed the history, technology, and applications of the growing computer network infrastructure. Exhibits included an interactive live air traffic control display,

912-665: A buffer that could accept one megabyte per second. In 1974, a keyboard and screen were fitted to the Micral computers. A hard disk (first made by CAELUS then by Diablo ) became available in 1975. In 1979, the Micral 8031 D was equipped with a 5" 1/4 inches hard disk of 5 Megabytes made by Shugart . Following the April 1974 introduction of the Intel 8080 , R2E introduced the second and third Micral models, 8008-based at 1 MHz Micral G and 8080-based at 1 MHz Micral S . In November 1975, R2E signed Warner & Swasey Company as

1026-443: A button that, when pressed, ejects the disk with varying degrees of force, the discrepancy due to the ejection force provided by the spring of the shutter. In IBM PC compatibles , Commodores, Apple II/IIIs, and other non-Apple-Macintosh machines with standard floppy disk drives, a disk may be ejected manually at any time. The drive has a disk-change switch that detects when a disk is ejected or inserted. Failure of this mechanical switch

1140-549: A common language - COBOL. A 1970s vignette portrayed a PDP-8 minicomputer being used backstage to control theater lighting, and applications to scientific computer were shown with a CRAY-1 at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A student publishing her school newspaper using a Macintosh showed the beginning of personal computing. The exhibition demonstrated eight application areas using some 40 computer stations. The first area, "Making Pictures" featured

1254-480: A computer animation theater. Many of the exhibits were developed with the help of university and corporate research labs. The exhibition was developed under the direction of Oliver Strimpel with Geoff Dutton. Digital image processing The gallery included the history, technology and applications of digital image processing. Possibly the first-ever digital image was acquired from Jet Propulsion Labs, consisting of hand-assembled colored strips of line-printer output from

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1368-476: A corporate facility, from its inception the museum's activities were altruistic, with an industry-wide, international preservation mission. In spring 1982, the museum received non-profit charitable foundation status from the Internal Revenue Service . In Fall 1983, The Computer Museum, which had dropped "Digital" from its title, decided to relocate to Museum Wharf in downtown Boston, sharing

1482-650: A customized operating system is used that has no drivers for USB devices. Hardware floppy disk emulators can be made to interface floppy-disk controllers to a USB port that can be used for flash drives. In May 2016, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within federal agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy disks are still used to coordinate "the operational functions of

1596-428: A disk can be accessed, the drive needs to synchronize its head position with the disk tracks. In some drives, this is accomplished with a Track Zero Sensor, while for others it involves the drive head striking an immobile reference surface. In either case, the head is moved so that it is approaching track zero position of the disk. When a drive with the sensor has reached track zero, the head stops moving immediately and

1710-474: A disk, some 3½-inch drives (notably the Macintosh External 400K and 800K drives ) instead use Constant Linear Velocity (CLV), which uses a variable speed drive motor that spins more slowly as the head moves away from the center of the disk, maintaining the same speed of the head(s) relative to the surface(s) of the disk. This allows more sectors to be written to the longer middle and outer tracks as

1824-879: A few artifacts were moved to the Museum of Science for eventual exhibits. The historical artifact collection was sent to the Computer History Museum forming the base of the museum's collection. An extensive archive of Computer Museum documents and videos of the history of the museum, formative memos at Digital Equipment Corporation and other materials was compiled by Gordon Bell and is now maintained by The Computer History Museum. Archive sections include: exhibits, with layouts and design documents; Pioneer Lecture Series Videos; Posters; The Computer Bowl; Museum Reports and Annual Reports; and Marketing material, such as brochures, guides, leaflets, press releases, and store catalogs. A Files section contains general documents of

1938-413: A hard-sectored disk, there are many holes, one for each sector row, plus an additional hole in a half-sector position, that is used to indicate sector zero. The Apple II computer system is notable in that it did not have an index hole sensor and ignored the presence of hard or soft sectoring. Instead, it used special repeating data synchronization patterns written to the disk between each sector, to assist

2052-420: A loaded disk can be removed manually by inserting a straightened paper clip into a small hole at the drive's front panel, just as one would do with a CD-ROM drive in a similar situation. The X68000 has soft-eject 5¼-inch drives. Some late-generation IBM PS/2 machines had soft-eject 3½-inch disk drives as well for which some issues of DOS (i.e. PC DOS 5.02 and higher) offered an EJECT command. Before

2166-479: A microprocessor (in this case, the Intel 8008 ). The Computer History Museum currently says that the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. The 1971 Kenbak-1 , invented before the first microprocessor, is considered to be the world's first "personal computer". That machine did not have a one-chip CPU but instead was based purely on small-scale integration TTL chips . R2E founder André Truong Trong Thi ( EFREI degree, Paris),

2280-619: A national and then international network of computer clubhouses was established. After the museum closed in 1999, the Clubhouse moved to the Museum of Science, Boston , which also served as the headquarters of The Computer Clubhouse Network. In 1988, the first annual Computer Bowl was held as a fund-raising event for The Computer Museum. The concept played upon rivalries between East Coast (especially Route 128 around Boston) and West Coast (mainly Silicon Valley) technology industries. It took

2394-424: A program of pioneering computer-animated shorts, including several from Pixar , such as Luxo Jr. A permanent gallery devoted to the history and technology of artificial intelligence and robotics opened in 1987. Knowledge-based systems Interactive exhibits focused on expert systems. Examples included a medical diagnosis system, a simple rule-based simulated bargaining store-keeper with whom visitors haggled over

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2508-431: A real-time view into stock exchange transactions, and several internet stations (not commonly found in public spaces at that time) with constantly changing selections of sample web sites to reveal the diversity of Internet applications. In this 2,200 square-foot virtual undersea world, visitors used interactive stations located in front of a giant projection display to design their own virtual fish, and then release it into

2622-557: A recovery. The music and theatre industries still use equipment requiring standard floppy disks (e.g. synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, and lighting consoles ). Industrial automation equipment such as programmable machinery and industrial robots may not have a USB interface; data and programs are then loaded from disks, damageable in industrial environments. This equipment may not be replaced due to cost or requirement for continuous availability; existing software emulation and virtualization do not solve this problem because

2736-522: A renovated wool warehouse with Boston Children's Museum . Oliver Strimpel, recruited from the Science Museum in London , was appointed to develop a major exhibit on computer graphics and image processing, later being appointed executive director in 1990. On November 13, 1984, the museum officially re-opened to the public at its new 53,000 square foot location. The initial set of exhibits featured

2850-468: A selectable option and purchasable as an aftermarket OEM add-on. By January 2007, only 2% of computers sold in stores contained built-in floppy disk drives. Floppy disks are used for emergency boots in aging systems lacking support for other bootable media and for BIOS updates, since most BIOS and firmware programs can still be executed from bootable floppy disks . If BIOS updates fail or become corrupt, floppy drives can sometimes be used to perform

2964-505: A single hole in the rotating floppy disk medium line up. This mechanism is used to detect the angular start of each track, and whether or not the disk is rotating at the correct speed. Early 8‑inch and 5¼‑inch disks also had holes for each sector in the enclosed magnetic medium, in addition to the index hole, with the same radial distance from the center, for alignment with the same envelope hole. These were termed hard sectored disks. Later soft- sectored disks have only one index hole in

3078-447: A small circle of floppy magnetic material encased in hard plastic. Earlier types of floppy disks did not have this plastic case, which protects the magnetic material from abuse and damage. A sliding metal cover protects the delicate magnetic surface when the diskette is not in use and automatically opens when the diskette is inserted into the computer. The diskette has a square shape: there are apparently eight possible ways to insert it into

3192-411: A small oblong opening in both sides to allow the drive's heads to read and write data and a large hole in the center to allow the magnetic medium to spin by rotating it from its middle hole. Inside the cover are two layers of fabric with the magnetic medium sandwiched in the middle. The fabric is designed to reduce friction between the medium and the outer cover, and catch particles of debris abraded off

3306-507: A speech recognition system. Touch: visitors touch a pressure-sensitive pad that outputs the distribution of pressure under their figures onto a display. Sonar: a ceiling-mounted sensor measured a visitor's height by bouncing a signal off the top of the head. Robot Theater A collection of robots were arrayed inside a theater, each of which, when highlighted in the theater's video program, lit up and, in several cases, performed movements. Mobile robots included: Shakey , Prototype Mars Rover,

3420-424: A tableau of real-world objects that have vexed programmers' attempts to render them realistically. Dynamic exhibits included: A Window full of Polygons depicting the view of downtown Boston that visitors see from the gallery on a large pen-plotter that renders the buildings' silhouettes with changing colors and patterns; an interactive Koch snowflake fractal generator; and the first computer game SPACEWAR! running on

3534-414: A variety of special events, mostly relating to recreational computing. Examples included computer chess tournaments, partial Turing tests, World Micromouse Contest, Core War contests, Computer Animation Festival, The First Internet Auction, and the 25th Anniversary of Computer Games. Floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy , a diskette , or

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3648-475: Is a common source of disk corruption if a disk is changed and the drive (and hence the operating system) fails to notice. One of the chief usability problems of the floppy disk is its vulnerability; even inside a closed plastic housing, the disk medium is highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes. As with all magnetic storage , it is vulnerable to magnetic fields. Blank disks have been distributed with an extensive set of warnings, cautioning

3762-456: Is correctly aligned. For a drive without the sensor, the mechanism attempts to move the head the maximum possible number of positions needed to reach track zero, knowing that once this motion is complete, the head will be positioned over track zero. Some drive mechanisms such as the Apple II 5¼-inch drive without a track zero sensor, produce characteristic mechanical noises when trying to move

3876-428: Is still used by software on user-interface elements related to saving files even though physical floppy disks are largely obsolete. Examples of such software include LibreOffice , Microsoft Paint , and WordPad . The 8-inch and 5¼-inch floppy disks contain a magnetically coated round plastic medium with a large circular hole in the center for a drive's spindle. The medium is contained in a square plastic cover that has

3990-531: The 9020 . In 1981, R2E was bought by Groupe Bull . Starting with the Bull Micral 30 , which could use both Prologue and MS-DOS , Groupe Bull transformed the Micral computers into a line of PC compatibles. François Gernelle left Bull in 1983. Truong's R2E sold about 90,000 units of the Micral that were mostly used in vertical applications such as highway toll booths and process control. Litigation followed after Truong started claiming that he alone invented

4104-738: The Computer History Museum in California . The Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Museum Project began in 1975 with a display of circuit and memory hardware in a converted lobby closet of DEC's Main (Mill) Building 12 in Maynard, Massachusetts . In September 1979, with the assistance of Digital Equipment Corporation, Gordon and Gwen Bell founded the Digital Computer Museum in a former RCA building in Marlboro, Massachusetts . Though entirely funded by DEC and housed within

4218-461: The MIT Media Lab , The Computer Museum launched The Computer Clubhouse in 1993 to provide children from under-served inner city communities access to computers to learn how to use and program computers. Guided by adult mentors, children engaged in projects such as developing simulations, building and programming robots, and creating computer games. Spurred by a major grant from Intel Corp.,

4332-496: The Mariner 4 Mars probe (1965). Static exhibits included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, and a holographic animation of U.S. demographic evolution. Computer graphics Static exhibits included a display of early computer graphic input and output devices, examples of digital typography, the holographic animation American Graph Fleeting and A Visualizer's Bestiary ,

4446-712: The Stanford Cart , the quadruped Titan III from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a Denning Mobile Robot; robot arms included Unimate I, the Rancho and Stanford Arms and Orm from Stanford, the Direct Drive Arm-1 from Carnegie Mellon University, and the Tentacle Arm from MIT. A two-story-high model of a personal computer, simulated to be working interactively. The purpose of the exhibit

4560-551: The Type 1 Diskette in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy". In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the 5¼-inch floppy disk drive. By 1978, there were more than ten manufacturers producing such drives. There were competing floppy disk formats , with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as differential Manchester encoding (DM), modified frequency modulation (MFM), M FM and group coded recording (GCR). The 5¼-inch format displaced

4674-622: The 1982 ACM SIGGRAPH conference, Martin Newell donated his original teapot to Oliver Strimpel, wryly noting the symbolism of one Englishman giving another Englishman a teapot to be preserved and displayed a stone's throw from the site of the Boston Tea Party revolt of 1773. The exhibit displayed Allan Newell's original ceramic teapot alongside an Adage frame buffer display of a Bézier model of it, both responding interactively to changes in lighting selected by museum visitors with switches. Computer animation , an animation theater performed

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4788-398: The 1990s were non-networked, and floppy disks were the primary means to transfer data between computers, a method known informally as sneakernet . Unlike hard disks, floppy disks were handled and seen; even a novice user could identify a floppy disk. Because of these factors, a picture of a 3½-inch floppy disk became an interface metaphor for saving data. As of 2024 , the floppy disk symbol

4902-406: The 1990s. The birth of electronic computer milestone featured a piece of the 1951 Whirlwind I computer with an interactive exhibit explaining core memory. Machines for big business were exemplified by a UNIVAC I installation and an IBM System 360. The emergence of computer programming languages was featured in a milestone showing how for the first time, different computers were programmed to accept

5016-469: The 21st century, as a form of skeuomorphic design . While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment , they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed , such as USB flash drives , memory cards , optical discs , and storage available through local computer networks and cloud storage . The first commercial floppy disks, developed in

5130-527: The 720 KB double density 3½-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and the 1.44 MB (1,474,560 bytes) high-density version with the IBM Personal System/2 (PS/2) line in 1987. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988, Y-E Data introduced a drive for 2.88 MB Double-Sided Extended-Density (DSED) diskettes which was used by IBM in its top-of-the-line PS/2 and some RS/6000 models and in

5244-548: The 8-inch one for most uses, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the 5¼-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB (368,640 bytes) for the Double-Sided Double-Density (DSDD) format using MFM encoding. In 1984, IBM introduced with its PC/AT the 1.2 MB (1,228,800 bytes) dual-sided 5¼-inch floppy disk, but it never became very popular. IBM started using

5358-499: The PMS classification. The Transducer category was also added to cover input/output devices. The museum actively collected artifacts throughout its history, though acquisition criteria became more selective over time owing to increasingly adherence to collecting criteria and severely limited storage space. Acquired artifacts ranged in size from a single chip to the multiple components of a single mainframe computer. In addition to artifacts,

5472-473: The Sony design, introduced in 1983 by many manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By 1988, the 3½-inch was outselling the 5¼-inch. Generally, the term floppy disk persisted, even though later style floppy disks have a rigid case around an internal floppy disk. By the end of the 1980s, 5¼-inch disks had been superseded by 3½-inch disks. During this time, PCs frequently came equipped with drives of both sizes. By

5586-647: The United States' nuclear forces". The government planned to update some of the technology by the end of the 2017 fiscal year. Use in Japan's government ended in 2024. Windows 10 and Windows 11 no longer come with drivers for floppy disk drives (both internal and external). However, they will still support them with a separate device driver provided by Microsoft. The British Airways Boeing 747-400 fleet, up to its retirement in 2020, used 3½-inch floppy disks to load avionics software. Sony, who had been in

5700-509: The board: Kenneth H. Olsen (1982–1984), John William Poduska Sr. (1984–1988), Gardner C. Hendrie (1988–1993), Charles A. Zraket (1993–1997), and Lawrence Weber (1997–2000). The museum's collections were jump-started with the collections of Gordon and Gwen Bell, who had been actively collecting since the 1970s. To bring structure and discipline to collecting efforts, an acquisitions policy was developed in which computing materials were classified into Processor, Memory, and Switch categories, known as

5814-480: The brand Zenith . The Computer Museum, Boston The Computer Museum was a Boston , Massachusetts , museum that opened in 1979 and operated in three locations until 1999. It was once referred to as TCM and is sometimes called the Boston Computer Museum . When the museum closed and its space became part of Boston Children's Museum next door in 2000, much of its collection was sent to

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5928-574: The co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates , bought a Micral N by the auctioneer Rouillac at the Artigny Castle in France, on June 11, 2017 for his Seattle museum Living Computers: Museum + Labs . "Association MO5.com", a French preservation group, announced in 2023 that they had acquired a Micral N two years before in 2021. They are restoring it and documenting it. In 1989 Bull buys Zenith Data Systems , starting to release PC compatibles under

6042-629: The common memory so the local and common memory look like one monolithic memory for each processor. The system has a distributed multiprocessor operating system R2E said was based on sharing common resources and real-time task management. Some time after the July 1976 introduction of the Zilog Z80 , came the Z80-based Micral CZ . The 8080-based Micral C , an intelligent CRT terminal designed for word processing and automatic typesetting,

6156-463: The computer HAL's natural language capability in an excerpt of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey . Robot sensing Museum visitors could interact with four robot sensing modalities: vision, hearing, touch, and sonar. Vision: after arranging a set of simple shapes on a board, a vision system attempted to recognize them using edge detection. Hearing: this was exemplified by

6270-409: The computer in finding and synchronizing with the data in each track. The later 3½-inch drives of the mid-1980s did not use sector index holes, but instead also used synchronization patterns. Most 3½-inch drives used a constant speed drive motor and contain the same number of sectors across all tracks. This is sometimes referred to as Constant Angular Velocity (CAV). In order to fit more data onto

6384-406: The corresponding sensor; this was mainly a hardware cost-saving measure. The core of the 3½-inch disk is the same as the other two disks, but the front has only a label and a small opening for reading and writing data, protected by the shutter—a spring-loaded metal or plastic cover, pushed to the side on entry into the drive. Rather than having a hole in the center, it has a metal hub which mates to

6498-399: The current is reversed the magnetization aligns in the opposite direction, encoding one bit of data. To read data, the magnetization of the particles in the media induce a tiny voltage in the head coil as they pass under it. This small signal is amplified and sent to the floppy disk controller , which converts the streams of pulses from the media into data, checks it for errors, and sends it to

6612-585: The development of the Smart Machines gallery, robot collecting was especially active, with robots such as Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute's Direct Drive Arm I and Pluto Rover, GM Consight-I Project materials, Johns Hopkins University Adaptive Machines Group's Beast, Naval Systems International Sea Rover, and Rehabilitation Institute of Pittsburgh Page Turning Robot. The collections of Subassemblies and Components, Memories, Calculating Devices and Transducers continued to expand as well. Spurred by

6726-535: The difficulty of preserving a fast-evolving technology built by future-oriented engineers and entrepreneurs, the museum signed a joint collecting agreement with the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History to collectively ensure that important computing artifacts would be preserved. Under this 1987 agreement, a common catalog and database of both museums' collections would be created. In addition to exhibits principally directed to

6840-835: The disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive ( FDD ) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM in 1971, had a disk diameter of 8 inches (203.2 mm). Subsequently, the 5¼-inch (133.35 mm) and then the 3½-inch (88.9 mm) became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks. Floppy disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continue to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into

6954-399: The disk media, an action originally accomplished by a disk-load solenoid. Later drives held the heads out of contact until a front-panel lever was rotated (5¼-inch) or disk insertion was complete (3½-inch). To write data, current is sent through a coil in the head as the media rotates. The head's magnetic field aligns the magnetization of the particles directly below the head on the media. When

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7068-442: The disk shell are not quite square: its width is slightly less than its depth, so that it is impossible to insert the disk into a drive slot sideways (i.e. rotated 90 degrees from the correct shutter-first orientation). A diagonal notch at top right ensures that the disk is inserted into the drive in the correct orientation—not upside down or label-end first—and an arrow at top left indicates direction of insertion. The drive usually has

7182-466: The disk to keep them from accumulating on the heads. The cover is usually a one-part sheet, double-folded with flaps glued or spot-welded together. A small notch on the side of the disk identifies whether it is writable, as detected by a mechanical switch or photoelectric sensor . In the 8-inch disk, the notch being covered or not present enables writing, while in the 5¼-inch disk, the notch being present and uncovered enables writing. Tape may be used over

7296-466: The earliest machines to John V. Blankenbaker for the Kenbak-1 (1972), Robert Pond for the Altair 8800, Lee Felsenstein for the prototype VDM-1 , Don Lancaster for the prototype TVT-1, and Thi T. Truong for the Micral. In 1986–7, the museum acquired 27 computers, including a CDC 1604, MIT AI Lab CADR, MIT Lincoln Lab LINC, Prime Computer Model 300, Research Machines 380Z, and a Xerox Alto II. As part of

7410-406: The eight ways one might try to insert the diskette, only one is correct, and only that one will fit. An excellent design. A spindle motor in the drive rotates the magnetic medium at a certain speed, while a stepper motor-operated mechanism moves the magnetic read/write heads radially along the surface of the disk. Both read and write operations require the media to be rotating and the head to contact

7524-547: The exclusive manufacturer and marketer of the Micral line in the United States and Canada. Warner & Swasey marketed its Micral-based system for industrial data processing applications such as engineering data analysis, accounting and inventory control. R2E and Warner & Swasey displayed the Micral M multiple microcomputer system at the June 1976 National Computer Conference. The Micral M consists of up to eight Micral S microcomputers, each with its own local memory and sharing

7638-692: The existing 3½-inch designs was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, using very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 MB and backward-compatibility with standard 3½-inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy-disk products, although ultimately recordable CDs/DVDs, solid-state flash storage, and eventually cloud-based online storage would render all these removable disk formats obsolete. External USB -based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives. In

7752-467: The first personal computer. The courts did not judge in favor of Truong, who was declared "the businessman, but not the inventor", giving in 1998 the sole claim as inventor of the first personal computer to Gernelle and the R2E engineering team. In the mid-1970s, Philippe Kahn was a programmer for the Micral. Kahn later headed Borland which released Turbo Pascal and Sidekick in 1983. Paul G. Allen ,

7866-555: The flexibility of floppy disks combined with greater capacity, but remained niche due to costs. High-capacity backward compatible floppy technologies became popular for a while and were sold as an option or even included in standard PCs, but in the long run, their use was limited to professionals and enthusiasts. Flash-based USB thumb drives finally were a practical and popular replacement, that supported traditional file systems and all common usage scenarios of floppy disks. As opposed to other solutions, no new drive type or special software

7980-457: The floppy disk business since 1983, ended domestic sales of all six 3½-inch floppy disk models as of March 2011. This has been viewed by some as the end of the floppy disk. While production of new floppy disk media has ceased, sales and uses of this media from inventories is expected to continue until at least 2026. For more than two decades, the floppy disk was the primary external writable storage device used. Most computing environments before

8094-589: The form of a live and televised (usually on Stewart Cheifet 's PBS series Computer Chronicles ) computer trivia contest between East and West Coast teams of industry and academic leaders, modeled somewhat on the College Bowl format. Between 1988 and the last Bowl held in 1998, team members included Marc Andreessen, John Doerr, Esther Dyson, Bill Gates, William "Bill" Joy, Mitchell Kapor, John Markoff, Patrick McGovern, Walt Mossberg, Nathan Myhrvold, Nicholas Negroponte, and John William Poduska. The museum hosted

8208-557: The founding and operation of the museum from the Internet Archive , the Computer History Museum , Gordon Bell and Gwen Bell , and Gardner Hendrie. An illustrated timeline weaves the sections together to provide an overview. The Computer Museum was governed by a Board of Directors, which appointed the executive director and various board committees to oversee operations and other areas such as collections, exhibits, education, and development. The following served as chairman of

8322-512: The general population, floppy disks were often used to store a computer's operating system (OS). Most home computers from that time have an elementary OS and BASIC stored in read-only memory (ROM), with the option of loading a more advanced OS from a floppy disk. By the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use. An attempt to enhance

8436-492: The giant chassis, visitors walked between a wall-sized graphics card and memory card to the microprocessor, upon which a projected electron microscope imagery of a CPU's circuits in operation appeared. Further on, a RAM set of modules plugged into the motherboard included reveals showing electron microscope imagery of memory circuits, Peering into a mini-van sized hard drive, visitors could see read/write heads position themselves on either side of rotating platters. Richard Fowler

8550-431: The greater capacity, compatibility with existing CD-ROM drives, and—with the advent of re-writeable CDs and packet writing—a similar reusability as floppy disks. However, CD-R/RWs remained mostly an archival medium, not a medium for exchanging data or editing files on the medium itself, because there was no common standard for packet writing which allowed for small updates. Other formats, such as magneto-optical discs , had

8664-407: The heads past the reference surface. This physical striking is responsible for the 5¼-inch drive clicking during the boot of an Apple II, and the loud rattles of its DOS and ProDOS when disk errors occurred and track zero synchronization was attempted. All 8-inch and some 5¼-inch drives used a mechanical method to locate sectors, known as either hard sectors or soft sectors , and is the purpose of

8778-485: The history of computing, the museum re-opened in 1984 with a 4,000-square-foot gallery on digital image processing and computer graphics, entitled The Computer and the Image. The exhibits addressed the history of the field, the basic principles of digital image processing and image synthesis, and applications of the technologies. The exhibition featured historical artifacts, explanatory text and images, interactive exhibits, and

8892-554: The history of computing. First called The Computer Museum History Center, it was housed in a storage building near Hangar One at Moffett Field , California . In 2001, it changed its name to the Computer History Museum and acquired its own building in Mountain View, California , in 2002. In 1999, the Computer Museum merged with the Museum of Science, Boston . When the museum closed as an independent entity in 2000,

9006-450: The host computer system. A blank unformatted diskette has a coating of magnetic oxide with no magnetic order to the particles. During formatting, the magnetizations of the particles are aligned forming tracks, each broken up into sectors , enabling the controller to properly read and write data. The tracks are concentric rings around the center, with spaces between tracks where no data is written; gaps with padding bytes are provided between

9120-499: The late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and both drives and disks were then sold separately starting in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates , and Burroughs Corporation . The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970, and although IBM announced its first media as

9234-424: The machine, only one of which is correct. What happens if I do it wrong? I try inserting the disk sideways. Ah, the designer thought of that. A little study shows that the case really isn't square: it's rectangular, so you can't insert a longer side. I try backward. The diskette goes in only part of the way. Small protrusions, indentations, and cutouts prevent the diskette from being inserted backward or upside down: of

9348-399: The media. In some 5¼-inch drives, insertion of the disk compresses and locks an ejection spring which partially ejects the disk upon opening the catch or lever. This enables a smaller concave area for the thumb and fingers to grasp the disk during removal. Newer 5¼-inch drives and all 3½-inch drives automatically engage the spindle and heads when a disk is inserted, doing the opposite with

9462-400: The medium, and sector position is determined by the disk controller or low-level software from patterns marking the start of a sector. Generally, the same drives are used to read and write both types of disks, with only the disks and controllers differing. Some operating systems using soft sectors, such as Apple DOS , do not use the index hole, and the drives designed for such systems often lack

9576-493: The mid-1990s, 5¼-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3½-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. The advantages of the 3½-inch disk were its higher capacity, its smaller physical size, and its rigid case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks. Floppy disks became commonplace during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups . Before hard disks became affordable to

9690-485: The mid-1990s, mechanically incompatible higher-density floppy disks were introduced, like the Iomega Zip disk . Adoption was limited by the competition between proprietary formats and the need to buy expensive drives for computers where the disks would be used. In some cases, failure in market penetration was exacerbated by the release of higher-capacity versions of the drive and media being not backward-compatible with

9804-742: The museum collected images, film, and video. Noteworthy early acquisitions included parts of Whirlwind 1, UNIVAC 1, the TX-0, a CPU from the Burroughs ILLIAC IV, IBM 7030 "Stretch", NASA Apollo Guidance Computer Prototype, a CDC 6600, a CRAY-1, PDP-1, PDP-8, EDSAC Storage Tube, Colossus pulley, and components of the Ferranti Atlas, and the Manchester Mark I. In June 1984, the collection of artifacts and films numbered 900 cataloged items. Examples of acquisitions of computers in

9918-526: The notch to change the mode of the disk. Punch devices were sold to convert read-only 5¼" disks to writable ones, and also to enable writing on the unused side of single-sided disks for computers with single-sided drives. The latter worked because single- and double-sided disks typically contained essentially identical actual magnetic media, for manufacturing efficiency. Disks whose obverse and reverse sides were thus used separately in single-sided drives were known as flippy disks . Disk notching 5¼" floppies for PCs

10032-485: The old format, including a rigid case with a sliding metal (or later, sometimes plastic) shutter over the head slot, which helped protect the delicate magnetic medium from dust and damage, and a sliding write protection tab, which was far more convenient than the adhesive tabs used with earlier disks. The large market share of the well-established 5¼-inch format made it difficult for these diverse mutually-incompatible new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on

10146-492: The original drives, dividing the users between new and old adopters. Consumers were wary of making costly investments into unproven and rapidly changing technologies, so none of the technologies became the established standard. Apple introduced the iMac G3 in 1998 with a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive; this made USB-connected floppy drives popular accessories, as the iMac came without any writable removable media device. Recordable CDs were touted as an alternative, because of

10260-564: The pioneering Whirlwind Computer, the SAGE computer room , an evolutionary series of computers built by Seymour Cray , and a 20-year timeline of computing developments that included many artifacts collected by Gordon Bell. Also among the opening exhibits was a permanent gallery devoted to the history, technology, and applications of digital imaging entitled The Computer and the Image. Prior to all of this, DEC's Ken Olsen and Mitre Corporation 's Robert Everett had, in 1973, "saved Whirlwind from

10374-667: The preceding year included an Apple 1, Burroughs B-500, Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-1, Franklin Ace 100, and IBM SAGE: AN/FSQ-7 components. Several types of memory were acquired, including core memory, plasma cell memory, rope memory, selectron tube, magnetic cards, mercury delay line, and fixed-head drum. In the following years noteworthy acquisitions of computers included: Amdahl 470V/6, Apollo Domain DN100 workstation, Control Data Little Character, Data General Eclipse, Evans & Sutherland Line Drawing System-2, Osborne 1, SCELBI 8H minicomputer, and

10488-409: The press of the eject button. On Apple Macintosh computers with built-in 3½-inch disk drives, the ejection button is replaced by software controlling an ejection motor which only does so when the operating system no longer needs to access the drive. The user could drag the image of the floppy drive to the trash can on the desktop to eject the disk. In the case of a power failure or drive malfunction,

10602-449: The price of a crate of strawberries, a computer composition system, and a system that plays tic-tac-toe according to a visitor-selected strategy. Natural language understanding Visitors could sit at computers and ask questions of ELIZA , the automated psychotherapist that was noteworthy because despite its basic rule-based behavior, users became deeply engaged with it. In an interactive video disk system, visitors were invited to analyze

10716-403: The read operation; other errors are permanent and the disk controller will signal a failure to the operating system if multiple attempts to read the data still fail. After a disk is inserted, a catch or lever at the front of the drive is manually lowered to prevent the disk from accidentally emerging, engage the spindle clamping hub, and in two-sided drives, engage the second read/write head with

10830-402: The request of the company CCMC specializing in payroll and accounting. The Portal was based on an Intel 8085 processor, 8-bit, clocked at 2 MHz. It weighed 12 kg (26 lb) and its dimensions were 45 cm x 45 cm x 15 cm, It provided total mobility. Its operating system was Prologue. Later Micrals used the Intel 8088 . The last Micral designed by François Gernelle was

10944-573: The scrap heap" and "arranged to exhibit it at the Smithsonian ." Olsen began warehousing other old computers, even as the Bells, independently, "were thinking about a computer museum" and collecting artifacts. While the majority of the museum's energies and funding were focused on the growing exhibitions and educational programs, the resources available for the historical collections remained flat. Though active collection of artifacts continued, there

11058-651: The second-generation NeXTcube and NeXTstation ; however, this format had limited market success due to lack of standards and movement to 1.44 MB drives. Throughout the early 1980s, limits of the 5¼-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be more practical than the 8-inch format, it was becoming considered too large; as the quality of recording media grew, data could be stored in a smaller area. Several solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, 2½-, 3-, 3¼-, 3½- and 4-inches (and Sony 's 90 mm × 94 mm (3.54 in × 3.70 in) disk) offered by various companies. They all had several advantages over

11172-502: The sectors and at the end of the track to allow for slight speed variations in the disk drive, and to permit better interoperability with disk drives connected to other similar systems. Each sector of data has a header that identifies the sector location on the disk. A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is written into the sector headers and at the end of the user data so that the disk controller can detect potential errors. Some errors are soft and can be resolved by automatically re-trying

11286-599: The simulated fishtank. Once in the tank, the fish behaved according to the behavioral rules chosen during its design, with surprising results. Together with a set of interactive stations, the exhibit, created in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab and Nearlife, Inc., aimed to reveal how simple behavioral rules lead to distinctive emergent behavior in complex systems such as traffic flows and city demographic distributions. The museum developed temporary exhibits, some of which traveled to other museums. In collaboration with

11400-413: The small hole in the jacket, off to the side of the spindle hole. A light beam sensor detects when a punched hole in the disk is visible through the hole in the jacket. For a soft-sectored disk, there is only a single hole, which is used to locate the first sector of each track. Clock timing is then used to find the other sectors behind it, which requires precise speed regulation of the drive motor. For

11514-408: The spindle of the drive. Typical 3½-inch disk magnetic coating materials are: Two holes at the bottom left and right indicate whether the disk is write-protected and whether it is high-density; these holes are spaced as far apart as the holes in punched A4 paper, allowing write-protected high-density floppy disks to be clipped into international standard ( ISO 838 ) ring binders . The dimensions of

11628-442: The user not to expose it to dangerous conditions. Rough treatment or removing the disk from the drive while the magnetic media is still spinning is likely to cause damage to the disk, drive head, or stored data. On the other hand, the 3½‑inch floppy disk has been lauded for its mechanical usability by human–computer interaction expert Donald Norman : A simple example of a good design is the 3½-inch magnetic diskette for computers,

11742-550: Was a lack of suitable collections storage and study space. Furthermore, with the inexorable shift of the U.S. computer industry from Boston to the West Coast, the museum's Boston location became a handicap from the point of view of collecting as well as industry support. In 1996, a group of Computer Museum Board members established a division of the museum in Silicon Valley exclusively devoted to collecting and preserving

11856-570: Was advertised in the March 1974 issue of QST , an amateur radio magazine. Indeed, INRA was originally planning to use PDP-8 computers for process control, but the Micral N could do the same for a fifth of the cost. An 8-inch floppy disk reader was added to the Micral in December 1973, following a command of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique . This was made possible by the pile-canal,

11970-409: Was generally only required where users wanted to overwrite original 5¼" disks of store-bought software, which somewhat commonly shipped with no notch present. Another LED/photo-transistor pair located near the center of the disk detects the index hole once per rotation in the magnetic disk. Detection occurs whenever the drive's sensor, the holes in the correctly inserted floppy's plastic envelope and

12084-564: Was introduced in July 1977. It has two Shugart SA400 minifloppy drives and a panel of system control and sense switches below the minifloppy drives. Business application language (BAL) and FORTRAN are supported. By October, R2E had set up an American subsidiary, R2E of America, in Minneapolis. The Micral V Portable (1978) could run FORTRAN and assembler under the Sysmic operating system, or BAL. The original Sysmic operating system

12198-468: Was little financial incentive to omit the device from a system. Subsequently, enabled by the widespread support for USB flash drives and BIOS boot, manufacturers and retailers progressively reduced the availability of floppy disk drives as standard equipment. In February 2003, Dell , one of the leading personal computer vendors, announced that floppy drives would no longer be pre-installed on Dell Dimension home computers, although they were still available as

12312-642: Was optional, offering customers the option of designing their own console to match a particular application. It was delivered to the INRA in January 1973, and commercialized in February 1973 for FF 8,500 (about $ 1,750) making it a cost-effective replacement for minicomputers which augured the era of the PC. France had produced the first microcomputer. A year would pass before the first North American microcomputer, SCELBI ,

12426-402: Was recruited from The Science Museum, London/Bradford, as exhibit designer. The exhibit garnered international publicity and more than doubled visitor traffic to the museum. Through a series of nine milestones portrayed with vignettes and interactive exhibits, this permanent exhibit portrayed computing from the punched card machines of the 1930s through the ubiquitous embedded microprocessors of

12540-582: Was renamed Prologue in 1978. Prologue was able to perform real-time multitasking , and was a multi-user system. R2E offered CP/M for the Micral C in 1979. The R2E Micral CCMC Portal portable microcomputer made its official appearance in September 1980 at the SICOB show in Paris. It was designed and marketed by the studies and developments department of François Gernelle of the french firm R2E Micral at

12654-443: Was required that impeded adoption, since all that was necessary was an already common USB port . By 2002, most manufacturers still provided floppy disk drives as standard equipment to meet user demand for file-transfer and an emergency boot device, as well as for the general secure feeling of having the familiar device. By this time, the retail cost of a floppy drive had fallen to around $ 20 (equivalent to $ 34 in 2023), so there

12768-440: Was responsible for the memory system, I/O high speed channel, power supply and front panel. Gernelle invented the Micral N, which was much smaller than existing minicomputers . The January 1974 Users Manual called it "the first of a new generation of mini-computer whose principal feature is its very low cost," and said, "MICRAL's principal use is in process control . It does not aim to be an universal mini-computer." The computer

12882-605: Was to be delivered in December 1972, and Gernelle, Lacombe, Benchetrit and Beckmann had to work in a cellar in Châtenay-Malabry for 18 hours a day in order to deliver the computer in time. The software, the ROM -based MIC 01 monitor and the ASMIC 01 assembler , was written on an Intertechnique Multi-8 minicomputer using a cross assembler . The computer was based on an Intel 8008 microprocessor clocked at 500 kHz. It had

12996-447: Was to show the anatomy of a computer and to explain how the various parts work and communicate with each other. Before entering the computer's chassis, visitors could roll a giant trackball to play "World Traveller" on the giant screen. Wall-sized graphics by David Macaulay and interactive exhibits explained how all kinds of information, from text, graphics, video, music, as well as computer programs can be represented as 1's and 0's. Inside

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