The real question is why were 1.44mb 3 1/2" floppy drives used for so long when they were totally obsolete by 1990. I would love to read a more coherent and unified history; my understanding is that there were tons of competing higher-capacity 3 1/2" drives between ~1985 and 1995, but software developers were stuck releasing on 1.44mb because that was the only format which worked reliably across manufacturers. By the time Zip drive came out, software was distributed on CD and higher-capacity floppies were really only used for (geographically) local data transfer.

Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.

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rasz 2 days ago | parent [-]

3.5 inch already peaked in 1985, thats when NEC first shipped 1.44MB inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed two years later switching PS/2 to HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80 tracks ~50KB/s speed. In 1990 IBM bumped PS/2 to 2.88 ED. Different magnetic material, double the bitrate, ~100KB/s.

... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13MB unformatted 9MB formatted capacity. Same perpendicular head as ED, same magnetic medium, same bitrate, 3 times more tracks (240) while still using cheap stepper motor unlike ZIP head actuators, compatible with same standard ED floppy controller chips. Sadly no one in the west adopted it :(((

There was one more avenue for bumping capacity never really explored on PC - zone bit recording invented by Chuck Peddle in 1961 and supported by Floppy controllers in Macintoshes, Commodore (Chuck Peddle designed drives) and Victor 9000 (Chuck Peddle designed whole computer). Free 50% capacity bump. Victor 9000 pulled 1.2MB capacity out of Double Density 80 track 5 1/4 drive.

Combine 2TD wiht ZBR and we could have had cheap 13.5MB formatted capacity floppies since 1988.

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LeCompteSftware 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB because that was the only thing guaranteed to work. There was a human management problem around agreeing on a specification; drive manufacturers and software companies simply had conflicting incentives, so the market was a mess.

In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.

	▲	rasz a day ago \| parent [-]
		>software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers Oh they could and they did in Japan when those computers were sold. PC-88 is not IBM PC compatible. https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3