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Comment by kleer001 | Hacker News Reader

5.25" floppies were on their way out in the mid 1980s, USB was born in the late 1990s and 3.5" disks were still around and in high use then. It's a generational thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History

The same reason there aren't Apple, Amiga, or Android branded Morse code keys.

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You mention USB as well. Some people fail to remember that many 3.5" floppy drives in laptops used a USB connection internally. Maybe for that reason the chip already exists where a 5.25 does not.

And ? Both 5" and 3.5" used the same protocol/ electrical interface. The only true difference it's the motor speed and the number of tracks/sectors stored.

That doesn't mean anyone wanted to include a dedicated Floppy bus anymore.

My ignorance includes my simply not knowing of any of these controllers working with 5.25.

I guess that makes sense, but the cheap USB drives you find on Amazon are of recent manufacture, so for some reason it makes sense to keep making them.

Lots of legacy systems, industrial machines etc. still use 3.5" floppies, so many people will still have a need to write them with modern computers to transfer stuff to these machines. My mom actually has a fancy sewing machine that uses 3.5" floppies for patterns and she uses a usb floppy drive to write to it.

How else do you expect me to download pictures from my Sony Mavica /s

Oh, man, I remember when that was state of the art and everyone in the computer art department would sign up weeks ahead to get a day's use of it and fill that disk with like 12 images.

When was this? 1997.

It might have changed by now, but at least a few years ago 3.5" floppies were still used to exchange crucial information in the health sector here in Norway.

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