First floppy was Re: IBM 5100

Tue Aug 17 00:30:15 CDT 2004

Nico de Jong wrote:

> My first encounter with 8" floppies was with a S/370, IIRC.
> There was a vertical floppy drive near the top of the system.
> What was that used for ? Microcode, diagnostics, .... ?

The 8" floppy was invented as a method of loading microcode and first 
used for the IBM 3330 disk controller and soon thereafter for 370 series 
processors. At that time it was a read only device (at the customer site)

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa110198.htm

   -- HansP