History (1988): 12.5MB on 3.5-inch Floppy Disk From Hitachi Maxell

Hitachi Maxell K.K. (Japan) reached a 12.5MB capacity on a 3.5-inch FD.

Up to now, the best results were 4MB and concerned a vertical magnetizing method and a super fine grain barium-ferrite.

Hitachi uses a pure iron metal disk and records data ina conventional horizontal direction.

NEC will offer this 12.5 MB FD on a drive, the model PC FD81 0.1, as a stand alone external memory unit for its PC series. It hopes to sell 15,000 of these drives the first year.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠6, volume ≠1, published on July 1988.