Floppy disk

Diskettes were a popular medium of storing information in the 1970's up until the 1990's. They were cheap to manufacture, and duplicate. Unlike tapes, they are random access, and the media isn't rigid unlike hard disks, giving them the common name of 'floppy diskettes'.

As time went on the form factor of diskettes continued to shrink from 8" to 5 1/4", to 3 1/2".

8" diskettes

An 8" diskette

8" disks were popular in the 1970's and could be found in consoles on mini computers (DEC's), mainframe controllers, and even down to CP/M computers. Capacities go from 79kb up to a 1.2MB capacity.

Twiggies

A twiggy

I think this short lived format was only for the Apple Lisa computer. I recall hearing they were very temperamental, the drives would go out of alignment often, destroying data..

Other then that I don't know anything about it.

5 1/4" diskettes

An 5 1/4" diskette collage

These disks were immensly popular back in the day with the low density variation being used in Apple, Atari, Commodore, and IBM compatible computers. Capacities ranged from 160kb up to 1.2MB for the high density disks

3 1/2" diskettes

A 3 1/3" diskette

If I remember right, the original Mac was the first mainstream machine to ship with the 3 1/2" disk, with a formatted capacity of 400KB as it was single sided. Capacities went up to 2.88MB. While encased in a hard shell, they still had the same flexible media type of prior diskettes. This did lead to some confusion with people referring to these as hard disks...