All initiatives to establish a floppy disk standard with a capacity higher than 1.44Mb have failed so far – whatever happened to IBM Corp’s 2.88Mb drives? – but Compaq Computer Corp is trying again: in a reflection that the technology has long been way ahead of the market, will jump straight to 120Mb. Its partners in the initiative are Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co and Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics Industries Ltd. The drive is to be launched later this year and 3M will offer disks for it, while the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co affiliate will make the drives, which will also read and write existing 1.44Mb 3.5 disks, and read 720Kb disks formatted for MS-DOS. The drives are claimed to deliver five times the performance of current 1.44Mb drives.
