The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk

A model of this put up initially appeared onTedium, Ernie Smith’s publication, which hunts for the top of the lengthy tail.

For those who ask the common particular person what the corporate 3M does, odds are if they’ve just a few grey hairs hanging out on their scalp, they could say that the corporate makes floppy disks. Now, this was as soon as true, however
should you 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 gear, and medical gear. (Youthful folks, in the event that they acknowledge 3M, it’s in all probability due to Submit-it notes, or extra not too long ago its N95 masks)

Floppies have had a surprisingly lengthy life—in January 2024,
Japan introduced it would not require floppy-disk copies of presidency submissions. However 3M acquired 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, beneath 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 ceaselessly declare that of the various makers of floppies on the market, 3M made one of the best ones. Provided that, I used to be curious to determine precisely why 3M turned probably the most memorable model in knowledge storage in the course of the formative days of computing, and why it deserted the product.

How 3M Turned a Key Innovator within the Manufacturing of Magnetic Knowledge Storage

Now, to be clear, 3M didn’t invent magnetic storage—that was executed 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 develop into one other large title in floppy disks, BASF. At first, the innovation didn’t unfold outdoors of Germany due to World Conflict II.

Nor was 3M the primary firm to popularize magnetic media—
that was Ampex, which commercialized the tape recorder within the late Forties. That was the purpose when magnetic tape become a significant innovation on the earth of music—one which, famously, Bing Crosby acquired 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 selections that folks level to as most important 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 Conflict II, one firm did try to 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 seemingly 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 in the course of the warfare, and the corporate revisited the thought instantly after. However, it wanted somebody to fabricate magnetic tape for it to make use of.

As creator David Morton famous in his 2006 ebook
Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Know-how, 3M was one of many best-suited firms available on the market to assist Brush out. That’s as a result of the groundbreaking work that the corporate had executed to develop pressure-sensitive adhesive tape was a necessary component of constructing magnetic tape efficient.

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

Surprisingly sufficient, Richard Gurley Drew, the inventor of a lot of 3M’s tape expertise, was a musician—he performed banjo in a neighborhood orchestra—when he took a job with the corporate. He in all probability didn’t understand he was inventing a key component of Twentieth-century recording expertise when he noticed that auto physique outlets wanted a approach to “masks off” areas of automobiles that have been being whittled down with sandpaper, however his remark 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 correct degree of easy-to-remove adhesive that it turned an out-and-out phenomenon. You would possibly 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 made out of cellophane, which by its nature was completely clear. One other 3M worker developed the tape dispenser, and the 2 innovations reshaped places of work the world over.

So, when Brush appeared to others to provide its recording medium, 3M was effectively positioned to assist out resulting from magnetic tape’s similarity with its Scotch Tape. Brush ultimately moved to different producers, like Dupont. However the expertise led 3M to proceed creating metal-oxide tape expertise, resulting in the creation of the Scotch 111 reel-to-reel tape, which was one of the in style sorts utilized in recording studios all through the Fifties, based on 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 after 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 observe me by three states and 5 cities, and now sit on
my deliberately organized pile of junk. Primarily based 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 could be questioning, how did 3M make the leap from reel-to-reel tape to floppies? It appears like simply as unusual a leap as a masking tape firm creating 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 method, 3M got here to media manufacturing from the wrong way than its disk-selling competitor Memorex did. Memorex began with computer systems and steadily got here to develop and enhance tape-based expertise, which ultimately advanced into floppy disks. Alternatively, 3M began with the uncooked supplies and the manufacturing processes, and mixed these into computing’s best commodity merchandise, the floppy disk.

3M acquired 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 expertise—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 comparable company historical past and brand design to fellow thick-Helvetica fanatic 3M. (Although 3M clearly by no means related to the Nazis throughout World Conflict II, so there’s that.)

3M branched out past commonplace 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 expertise additional, most notably with
Floptical disk expertise, which Jim Adkisson, who helped create the 5.25-inch floppy at Shugart Associates, developed within the Nineteen Eighties. A partnership of 3M, Maxell, and Iomega created the Floptical disk, which may maintain 20 megabytes of knowledge on one thing that appeared rather a lot like a 3.5-inch floppy. Sadly the floptical disk flopped, dropping out to merchandise like Iomega’s iconic Zip drives.

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

In some ways, 3M was out entrance on one of the essential parts of computing and was making big earnings from it. However by the top of 1995, these days have been executed. 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 advanced right into a US $2.3 billion enterprise, based on
Time, which made it a big chunk of 3M’s total providing.

However at the moment, excessive expertise—
particularly shopper expertise—was beginning to seem like a nasty wager for legacy firms. This was across the identical 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 an analogous disaster of tradition. In
A Century of Innovation, a ebook printed 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 “probably the most wrenching determination 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 selections that folks level to as most important 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 selections 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 power of many inside 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 idea of competitors; in addition they created all new, international industries. The companies have been extremely worthwhile for many years, they usually represented a big share of the corporate’s whole annual revenues. Additionally they produced lots of 3M’s subsequent technology 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 transferring out of its consolation zone. These merchandise, initially developed for companies, grew so in style that they out of the blue wanted to be accessible at each big-box retailer and drugstore alike, and, Submit-its apart, retail was not a match for the form of firm 3M was.

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

Whereas it bought its merchandise for little or no revenue, its competitors bought their merchandise for even much less. Despite the fact that the patron enterprise had big 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 struggle” meant 3M needed to make investments huge quantities of cash so as to stay the low-cost producer, with no assurance that revenue margins ever would enhance. “Exiting it was the correct determination,” [former senior vice president Al] Huber stated.

Seeing what got here after, it’s onerous to disagree. Whereas floppies have been nonetheless a big medium within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, it was apparent that they might not be sufficient capability for the following technology of knowledge 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 pc 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 return. 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 as we speak, is owned by O-Jin Corp., a Korean expertise firm
that principally purchased it for the its trademarked title.

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

3M’s Magnetic Legacy

In numerous methods, I believe 3M’s persisting deep affiliation with computing, even supposing the corporate left the sphere many years in the past, comes all the way down to the truth that it had a really recognizable brand design throughout its pc heyday.

My first expertise with 3M was seeing its brilliant crimson brand on floppy disks utilized in school rooms with Apple IIe computer systems within the late Nineteen Eighties and early ’90s. 3M was immediately recognizable amongst these chargeable for creating the disks we would have liked to load up Quantity Munchers and Commander Eager, and because of this, its title is eternally 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 numerous goodwill with youthful generations. For instance, the corporate is intently related to the manufacturing of a wide range of chemical compounds, together with PFOS (Perfluorooctane sulfonate), a key ingredient in Scotchguard and different waterproof supplies. It’s one among many PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl) substances which are 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 an enormous company that’s greatest described as an amalgamation of non-core companies loosely held collectively by a brand and backing in chemistry and uncooked supplies.