The floppy disk emerged from IBM at the same time the microprocessor emerged from Intel. When the first Altair and Imsai microcomputers came on the market in 1974 using the 8080 processor, there were no peripherals available to store data or even display words on a CRT screen. The only input/output device was a teletype. There wasn't even an operating system for these new computers. In 1975, Alan Shugart produced an 8-inch floppy disk to hold 800k that offered for the first time a low-cost drive for the emerging personal computer market. In 1976, Jim Adkisson, a Shugart engineer, sat down for lunch with a customer who complained that the 8-inch drive was too big for the personal computer. When Adkisson asked what the size should be, the customer pointed to a napkin on the table and said, "About that size." Adkisson returned to the Shugart lab with the napkin and designed the 5.25-inch floppy drive, introduced in 1976 as the model SA400 with a capacity of 110 KB. The model became one of Shugart's best sellers, with shipments the rose to 4000 drives per day. The company turned to Matsushita in Japan to help make the drives, starting that company on its rise to becoming the largest floppy drive manufacturer in the world. Sony developed a 3.5-inch floppy drive by 1980 and began a two-year effort to make it the U.S. floppy disk standard. Sony declared that its new drive was smaller, faster, better protected, and could fit in a shirt pocket. A group of U. S. disk manufacturers opposed the new standard. The group was led by Shugart Associates and Control Data, and included Verbatim, Micro Peripherals, Dysan and Tabor. They want to keep the standard 8-inch and 5.25-inch disks that has been dominated by U.S. companies since IBM introduced the floppy disk in 1971. However, no American company had a product equal to the Japanese diskette. Sales of the 3.5-inch floppy began to surpass the 5.25-inch version by 1989, and Japanese companies had driven most U.S. disk producers out of the market.
