Bye bye floppy...
The Comdex computer show at Las Vegas, USA, marked the end of the conventional 3-5 inch floppies when Sony and Panasonic unveiled their plans for rival high capacity drives and discs. Sony's High-Capacity 200-megabyte (MB) Floppy Disc has tracks just 9 micrometers wide and spins at 3600 revolutions per minute. It is capable of transferring data at up to 3-6 MB per second, fast enough for high quality video. Panasonic's rival disc boasts of tracks 0.01 millimetres (mm) wide and transfers data at 565 kilobytes (K) per second. Conventional discs have tracks 0.02 mm wide and transfer 100 K of data per second (New Scientist , Vol 156, No 2112).