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The Bernoulli Box (or simply Bernoulli, named after Bernoulli's principle) is a high-capacity (for the time) removable floppy disk storage system that is Iomega's first widely known product. It was released in 1982.
The original Bernoulli Alpha drive spins a PET film floppy disk at about 1500 rpm, [1] 1 μm over a read-write head, using Bernoulli's principle to pull the flexible disk towards the head as long as the disk is spinning. In theory this makes the Bernoulli drive more reliable than a contemporary hard disk drive, since a head crash is impossible.
The original disk cartridges came in capacities of 5, 10, and 20 MB; they are 8.23 x 11.02 x 0.71 inches, [1] about the size of a standard piece of letter paper but thicker.
The most popular system was the Bernoulli Box II, whose disk cases are 13.6 cm wide, 14 cm long and 0.9 cm thick, somewhat resembling a 5¼-inch standard floppy disk. The disks came in the following capacities: 20 MB, 35 MB, 44 MB, 65 MB, 90 MB (late 1980s), 105 MB, 150 MB, and in 1993, 230 MB. There are five types of drives, grouped by the maximum readable capacity: 20 MB, 44 MB, 90 MB, 150 MB, and 230 MB. The interface is usually SCSI. Drives were available as either internal units, which fit into standard 5 1⁄4-inch drive bays, or as external units with one or two drives in a self-contained case connected to the host computer via external SCSI connector. The disks have a physical switch similar to that on 3 1⁄2-inch standard floppy disks to enable and disable write protection.
PC Magazine in 1984 stated that the Bernoulli Box "... combines the advantages of [standard] floppy- and hard-disk systems without their drawbacks." It reported no software-compatibility problems and cited the box's durable design. [2] Bruce Webster of BYTE wrote favorably of the peripheral in February 1986, reporting that "I have not had a single glitch or lost file" in nine months of constant use. [3]
Iomega's later removable-storage products such as the Zip drive and Jaz and Rev removable hard disks did not use the Bernoulli technology.
Parallel ATA (PATA), originally AT Attachment, also known as IDE or Integrated Drive Electronics, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, optical disc drives, and tape drives in computers.
A floppy disk or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
The Macintosh Plus computer is the third model in the Macintosh line, introduced on January 16, 1986, two years after the original Macintosh and a little more than a year after the Macintosh 512K, with a price tag of US$2,599. As an evolutionary improvement over the 512K, it shipped with 1 MB of RAM standard, expandable to 4 MB, and an external SCSI peripheral bus, among smaller improvements. Originally, the computer's case was the same beige color as the original Macintosh, Pantone 453; however, in 1987, the case color was changed to the long-lived, warm gray "Platinum" color. It is the earliest Macintosh model able to run System Software 5, System 6, and System 7, up to System 7.5.5, but not System 7.5.2.
The SuperDisk LS-120 is a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 MB floppy disk. The SuperDisk hardware was created by 3M's storage products group Imation in 1996, with manufacturing chiefly by Matsushita.
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was announced by Iomega in 1994 and began shipping in March 1995. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB.
SyQuest Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYQT) was an early entrant into the hard disk drive market for personal computers. The company was founded on January 27, 1982 by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate, along with Ben Alaimo, Bill Krajewski, Anil Nigam and George Toldi. Its earliest products were the SQ306R, a 5 MB 3.9" (100 mm) cartridge disk drive and associated Q-Pak cartridge for IBM XT compatibles. Subsequently a non-removable medium version was announced, the SQ306F.
Floptical refers to a type of floppy disk drive that combines magnetic and optical technologies to store data on media similar to standard 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disks. The name is a portmanteau of the words "floppy" and "optical". It refers specifically to one brand of drive and disk system, but is also used more generically to refer to any system using similar techniques.
Iomega Corporation was a company that produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy disk system. Formerly a public company, it was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008, and then by Lenovo, which rebranded the product line as LenovoEMC, until discontinuation in 2018.
REV is a removable hard disk storage system from Iomega.
The Jaz drive is a removable hard disk storage system sold by the Iomega company from 1995 to 2002.
A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power hard disk drives or solid state drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.
The ProFile is the first hard disk drive produced by Apple Computer, initially for use with the Apple III personal computer. The original model had a formatted capacity of 5 MB and connected to a special interface card that plugged into an Apple III slot. In 1983, Apple offered a ProFile interface card for the Apple II, with software support for Apple ProDOS and Apple Pascal.
The PocketZip is a medium-capacity floppy disk storage system introduced by Iomega in 1999. It uses very small 40 MB disks. It was originally known as the "Clik!" drive until the click of death class action lawsuit regarding mass failures of Iomega's original Zip drives, after which it was renamed "PocketZip". In 2001, the company announced bigger-capacity 100 MB disks, which were never released.
A floppy-disk controller (FDC) is a hardware component that directs and controls reading from and writing to a computer's floppy disk drive (FDD). It has evolved from a discrete set of components on one or more circuit boards to a special-purpose integrated circuit or a component thereof. An FDC is responsible for reading data presented from the host computer and converting it to the drive's on-disk format using one of a number of encoding schemes, like FM encoding or MFM encoding, and reading those formats and returning it to its original binary values.
The Caleb Technology UHD144 is a floptical-based 144 MB floppy disk system introduced in early 1998, marketed as the it drive. Like other floptical-like systems, the UHD144 can read and write standard 720 KB and 1.44 MB 3½-inch disks as well. Its main advantage was the low cost of the media, which averaged about $5 shortly after introduction — in wider production prices would have fallen.
The Sun386i is a discontinued hybrid UNIX workstation/PC compatible computer system produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in 1988. It is based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor but shares many features with the contemporary Sun-3 series systems.
The EZ 135 Drive is a 3.5" removable platter hard disk drive. It was introduced by SyQuest Technology in 1995. It had a maximum capacity of 135 MB per disk.
In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc., the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory but faster and more expensive than tape drives.
The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the 8-inch format that preceded them, many proprietary floppy disk formats were developed, either using a different disk design or special layout and encoding methods for the data held on the disk.