Editing Floppy disk (section)

===Prevalence===
[[File:Imation USB FDD 20060623.jpg|thumb|left|[[Imation]] USB floppy drive, model 01946: an external drive that accepts high-density disks]]

Floppy disks became commonplace during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with [[personal computer]]s to distribute software, transfer data, and create [[backup]]s. Before hard disks became affordable to the general population,<ref group="nb" name="NB_Costs"/> floppy disks were often used to store a computer's [[operating system]] (OS). Most home computers from that time have an elementary OS and [[BASIC]] stored in [[read-only memory]] (ROM), with the option of loading a more advanced OS from a floppy disk.

By the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]] or [[Adobe Photoshop]] required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use.<ref name="businessweek">{{cite magazine |last=Reinhardt |first=Andy |date=1996-08-12 |title=Iomega's Zip drives need a bit more zip |magazine=[[Business Week]] |publisher=[[The McGraw-Hill Companies]] |issue=33 |issn=0007-7135 |url=http://www.businessweek.com/1996/33/b3488114.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080706151833/http://www.businessweek.com/1996/33/b3488114.htm |archive-date=2008-07-06}}</ref>

An attempt to enhance the existing 3½-inch designs was the [[SuperDisk]] in the late 1990s, using very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 [[Megabyte|MB]]<ref>{{cite web |url=http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/floppy8.html |title=floppy |publisher=LinuxCommand.org |date=2006-01-04 |access-date=2011-06-22 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110727034443/http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/floppy8.html |archive-date=2011-07-27}}</ref> and backward-compatibility with standard 3½-inch floppies; a [[format war]] briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy-disk products, although ultimately recordable CDs/DVDs, solid-state flash storage, and eventually cloud-based online storage would render all these removable disk formats obsolete. External [[USB]]-based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives.