A floppy disk is a data storage medium that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible ("floppy") magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive or FDD, the initials of which should not be confused with "fixed disk drive," which is another term for a (nonremovable) type of hard disk drive. Invented by IBM, floppy disks in 8-inch (200 mm), 5¼-inch (133.35 mm), and 3½-inch (90 mm) formats enjoyed many years as a popular and ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange, from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have now been largely superseded by USB flash drives, external hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and memory cards (such as Secure Digital). The flexible magnetic disk, or diskette revolutionized computer disk storage in the 1970s. Diskettes, which were often called floppy disks or floppies by English speaking users, became ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers and home computers, such as the Apple II, Macintosh, MSX/MSX 2/2+/TurboR, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3, Commodore 64/128, Atari ST, Amiga and IBM PC compatibles, to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups. Before hard disks became affordable, floppy disks were often also used to store a computer's operating system (OS), in addition to application software and data. Most home computers had a primary OS (and often BASIC) stored permanently in on-board ROM, with the option of loading a more advanced disk operating system from a floppy, whether it be a proprietary system, CP/M, or later, DOS.

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