The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk

A model of this submit initially appeared onTedium, Ernie Smith’s e-newsletter, which hunts for the tip of the lengthy tail.

For those who ask the typical particular person what the corporate 3M does, odds are if they’ve a number of grey hairs hanging out on their scalp, they could say that the corporate makes floppy disks. Now, this was as soon as true, however
for those who look on 3M’s personal web site, you will notice no point out of this legacy—it’s a agency that sells abrasive supplies, adhesive tapes, filters, movies, private protecting tools, and medical tools. (Youthful folks, in the event that they acknowledge 3M, it’s in all probability due to Put up-it notes, or extra just lately its N95 masks.)

Floppies have had a surprisingly lengthy life—in January 2024,
Japan introduced it can now not require floppy-disk copies of presidency submissions. However 3M bought out of the data-storage enterprise about 28 years in the past, when it transferred its floppy disk manufacturing to a spin-off known as Imation. Imation remains to be round, underneath the title Glassbridge Enterprises, however with a a lot smaller profile.

3M’s spin-off, Imation, continued producing floppy disks after 3M itself left the enterprise. IEEE Spectrum

Even with that stated, these gray-hairs will continuously declare that of the numerous makers of floppies on the market, 3M made the most effective ones. On condition that, I used to be curious to determine precisely why 3M turned essentially the most memorable model in knowledge storage through the formative days of computing, and why it deserted the product.

How 3M Grew to become a Key Innovator within the Manufacturing of Magnetic Knowledge Storage

Now, to be clear, 3M didn’t invent magnetic storage—that was carried out by Austro-German engineer
Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He created audio tape, a recording medium that began as broad strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and ultimately moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with assist from what would grow to be one other massive title in floppy disks, BASF. At first, the innovation didn’t unfold exterior of Germany due to World Battle II.

Nor was 3M the primary firm to popularize magnetic media—
that was Ampex, which commercialized the tape recorder within the late Nineteen Forties. That was the purpose when magnetic tape became a significant innovation on the earth of music—one which, famously, Bing Crosby bought to first as a result of he gave monetary assist to Ampex. By the way, Ampex’s later spinoff, Memorex, represented Silicon Valley’s first true startup.

“Of all the companies 3M has shed over its 100 years, the 2 seminal choices that folks level to as most vital concerned the sale of 3M’s Duplicating Merchandise enterprise to Harris Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spin-off of 3M’s data-storage and imaging-systems companies in 1996 creating a brand new firm known as Imation in Oakdale, Minnesota…”

Earlier than World Battle II, one firm did try and manufacture a tape recorder within the U.S. based mostly on Pfluemer’s magnetic-tape invention. That agency, the Brush Growth Co.,
had developed a tool known as the Soundmirror, produced by a Hungarian inventor named Semi J. Begun, who was doubtless one thing of a competitor to Pfleumer: Additionally a German, he had moved to america and developed a steel-based magnetic tape. The invention was utilized by the U.S. army through the conflict, and the corporate revisited the thought instantly after. However, it wanted somebody to fabricate magnetic tape for it to make use of.

As writer David Morton famous in his 2006 ebook
Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Expertise, 3M was one of many best-suited firms in the marketplace to assist Brush out. That’s as a result of the groundbreaking work that the corporate had carried out to develop pressure-sensitive adhesive tape was an important aspect of constructing magnetic tape efficient.

3M’s adhesive-tape know-how transferred readily to magnetic tape. 3M

Unusually sufficient, Richard Gurley Drew, the inventor of a lot of 3M’s tape know-how, was a musician—he performed banjo in an area orchestra—when he took a job with the corporate. He in all probability didn’t understand he was inventing a key aspect of Twentieth-century recording know-how when he noticed that auto physique outlets wanted a strategy to “masks off” areas of automobiles that have been being whittled down with sandpaper, however his commentary would show helpful to the invention of masking tape.

Within the mid-Fifties, 3M marketed its Scotch audio reel-to-reel tape.Audio Journal/Web Archive/Scotch

As Smithsonian Journal notes, the formulation he developed, combining cabinetmaker’s glue with glycerin, proved to be simply the suitable stage of easy-to-remove adhesive that it turned an out-and-out phenomenon. You may know his invention, developed in 1925, as Scotch Tape.

In 1930, he adopted it up with one other invention that was much more superb—tape constructed from cellophane, which by its nature was completely clear. One other 3M worker developed the tape dispenser, and the 2 innovations reshaped workplaces the world over.

So, when Brush regarded to others to supply its recording medium, 3M was effectively positioned to assist out as a consequence of magnetic tape’s similarity with its Scotch Tape. Brush ultimately moved to different producers, like Dupont. However the expertise led 3M to proceed growing metal-oxide tape know-how, resulting in the creation of the Scotch 111 reel-to-reel tape, which was one of the vital widespread sorts utilized in recording studios all through the Fifties, in line with the
Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording.

I admittedly have lengthy had a fascination with these reel-to-reel tapes. A variety of years in the past, again once I lived in Milwaukee, I discovered a few clean reel-to-reel tapes created by 3M utilizing the Scotch title. I purchased them from a junk retailer, and perhaps paid $2 for them. They managed to comply with me by three states and 5 cities, and now sit on
my deliberately organized pile of junk. Based mostly on my evaluation of the container and the logotype it makes use of, they date to the mid-Sixties or earlier. (No, I’ve not tried to document on them.)

I’ve owned this clean Scotch 150 reel-to-reel tape for practically 20 years. It’s 50 to 60 years previous. Ernie Smith

For years, 3M’s reel-to-reels had one of many strongest reputations within the music trade; they have been constructed to be of superhigh high quality. However you may be questioning, how did 3M make the leap from reel-to-reel tape to floppies? It looks like simply as unusual a leap as a masking tape firm growing reel-to-reel audio tape.

However, once more, it occurred.

How 3M’s Tapes Went From Music to Knowledge

3M didn’t develop the floppy disk drive, both.
IBM did, and Shugart Associates additional improved it by making it sufficiently small for normal customers.

3M manufactured a signature 5.25-inch floppy disk. IEEE Spectrum

However 3M, a lot as with mechanical tape, was effectively positioned to enhance on it, leveraging its expertise with mechanical media within the budding computing trade. In a means, 3M got here to media manufacturing from the other way than its disk-selling competitor Memorex did. Memorex began with computer systems and steadily got here to develop and enhance tape-based know-how, which ultimately developed into floppy disks. Alternatively, 3M began with the uncooked supplies and the manufacturing processes, and mixed these into computing’s biggest commodity merchandise, the floppy disk.

3M bought into the floppy disk market across the
fall of 1973. It was not the one producer of disks on the market—some names from this period embrace Verbatim, Management Knowledge, Dysan, and BASF. Most of those firms began with computing know-how—for instance, Dysan labored intently with Shugart Associates on the 5.25-inch floppy. However 3M wasn’t alone in beginning with the uncooked supplies. BASF, a German chemical producer, has a considerably related company historical past and brand design to fellow thick-Helvetica fanatic 3M. (Although 3M clearly by no means related to the Nazis throughout World Battle II, so there’s that.)

3M branched out past normal floppy disks with a wide range of magnetic-tape storage media.ComputerWorld/Google Books/3M

3M didn’t relaxation on its laurels with the floppy disk both, and tried to push the know-how additional, most notably with
Floptical disk know-how, which Jim Adkisson, who helped create the 5.25-inch floppy at Shugart Associates, developed within the Eighties. A partnership of 3M, Maxell, and Iomega created the Floptical disk, which might maintain 20 megabytes of information on one thing that regarded lots like a 3.5-inch floppy. Sadly the floptical disk flopped, shedding out to merchandise like Iomega’s iconic Zip drives.

3M additionally labored in additional specialised media, growing high-capacity optical disks that match into normal floppy and optical disk mechanisms, in addition to high-end tape drives supposed for the server room fairly than your cassette participant.

In some ways, 3M was out entrance on one of the vital necessary parts of computing and was making large income from it. However by the tip of 1995, these days have been carried out. What modified?

3M marketed its floppy disk as extra dependable than the competitors in no unsure phrases.

What Led 3M to Kick a Multibillion-Greenback Enterprise to the Curb

By 1995, 3M’s magnetic-media arm had developed right into a US $2.3 billion enterprise, in line with
Time, which made it a major chunk of 3M’s total providing.

However at the moment, excessive know-how—
particularly shopper know-how—was beginning to seem like a nasty wager for legacy firms. This was across the similar interval that AT&T, nonetheless smarting from misadventures just like the EO Private Communicator, spun off Bell Labs as Lucent Applied sciences.

3M’s story, in its personal phrases, suggests the same disaster of tradition. In
A Century of Innovation, a ebook revealed by the corporate in 2002, across the time of its 100-year anniversary, the corporate in contrast the creation of the spin-off, which it known as “essentially the most wrenching resolution in its historical past,” to that of its dedication eight years earlier to promote its Duplicating Merchandise Division, which bought copying machines:

Of all the companies 3M has shed over its 100 years, the 2 seminal choices that folks level to as most vital concerned the sale of 3M’s Duplicating Merchandise enterprise to Harris Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spin-off of 3M’s data-storage and imaging-systems companies in 1996 creating a brand new firm known as Imation in Oakdale, Minnesota, close to 3M headquarters. The 2 choices have a number of parts in widespread—each concerned companies that 3M created and, in actual fact, ranked primary within the market for many years. They have been “homegrown” companies—largely created inside 3M and commercialized and constructed with the vitality of many inner sponsors and champions. The companies have been dangerous as a result of the merchandise have been based mostly on pioneering applied sciences. They not solely modified the premise of competitors; in addition they created all new, international industries. The companies have been extremely worthwhile for many years, and so they represented a major share of the corporate’s whole annual revenues. In addition they produced a lot of 3M’s subsequent era of leaders.

So what occurred? Primarily, regardless of the corporate’s success working in industrial {and professional} settings, doing issues for shoppers like producing videotapes, floppy disks, and cassettes meant shifting out of its consolation zone. These merchandise, initially developed for companies, grew so widespread that they all of the sudden wanted to be out there at each big-box retailer and drugstore alike, and, Put up-its apart, retail was not a match for the type of firm 3M was.

However extra considerably, different firms have been merely higher at undercutting, and per the company biography, that required some powerful choices to be made:

Whereas it bought its merchandise for little or no revenue, its competitors bought their merchandise for even much less. Regardless that the patron enterprise had large progress potential, 3M had little expertise with a low-cost, low-profit-margin mannequin.

The markings have been clear—exit this enterprise, though 3M invented it. To remain within the “canine battle” meant 3M needed to make investments monumental quantities of cash to be able to stay the low-cost producer, with no assurance that revenue margins ever would enhance. “Exiting it was the suitable resolution,” [former senior vice president Al] Huber stated.

Seeing what got here after, it’s arduous to disagree. Whereas floppies have been nonetheless a major medium within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, it was apparent that they’d not be sufficient capability for the following era of information hoarders. It will solely be a few years earlier than Apple would put the primary dagger within the coronary heart of the floppy disk with
the iMac, breaking with custom by releasing a private laptop in 1998 with no built-in floppy disk drive.

Imation carried on a floppy-disk advert marketing campaign by the late Nineteen Nineties.

That was a harbinger of what was to come back. Inside a decade of the choice, floppy drives, compact cassettes, and videotapes—the three key parts of 3M’s transfer into consumer-driven magnetic media—had fallen by the wayside. Imation, nonetheless energetic right this moment, is owned by O-Jin Corp., a Korean know-how firm
that mainly purchased it for its trademarked title.

Very similar to its one-time competitor Memorex, Imation is a know-how ghost kitchen. Its former company mother or father 3M, in the meantime, has a market cap of $51.33 billion on the time of this writing.

3M’s Magnetic Legacy

In a number of methods, I believe 3M’s persisting deep affiliation with computing, even though the corporate left the sector a long time in the past, comes all the way down to the truth that it had a really recognizable brand design throughout its laptop heyday.

My first expertise with 3M was seeing its vivid crimson brand on floppy disks utilized in lecture rooms with Apple IIe computer systems within the late Eighties and early ’90s. 3M was immediately recognizable amongst these answerable for creating the disks we would have liked to load up Quantity Munchers and Commander Eager, and because of this, its title is without end imprinted into the brains of retro-tech nerds the world over. It’s a reminiscence that offers me heat emotions.

However 3M, for various causes, just isn’t an organization that carries a number of goodwill with youthful generations. For instance, the corporate is intently related to the manufacturing of a wide range of chemical substances, together with PFOS (Perfluorooctane sulfonate), a key ingredient in Scotchguard and different water resistant supplies. It’s considered one of many PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl) substances which can be believed to be dangerous to people.

The floppy disks that I and different elder millennials affiliate with an organization that was important to our youthful computing expertise are lengthy gone, shuttled away as a non-core enterprise for a large company that’s finest described as an amalgamation of non-core companies loosely held collectively by a brand and backing in chemistry and uncooked supplies.