History (1991): Intelligent Diskette Based on Chips From Smart Diskette

SmartDisquette Systems (Paris, France) is a new company created by Smart Diskette GmbH (SGO) and Innovatron to develop a new product named SmartDisk.

It’s a new media, the size of a 3.5-inch floppy disk, that’s not made with a magnetic media but a series of integrated circuits and a special chip that can emulate the magnetic field of a diskette.

It’s an intelligent memory associated to a real small computer that can be put into a standard diskette drive.

In particular, you can add specific functions to protect data, for example you won’t be able to copy the Smart Disk.

First scheduled applications will cover military and banking sectors. The price of this new media will depend on its level of intelligence, from FF200 to FF3,000. Its EPROM or EPEROM memory capacity will store 1MN to 3MB.

Innovatron is a company headed by Roland Moreno, the creator of smart cards.

See patent

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠40, published on May 1991.