Yoshiro Nakamatsu
Nakamatsu claims IBM reached licensing agreements with him in the late 1970s. He also claims to have licensed his floppy disk to IBM in 1979, but that the details are "confidential". An IBM spokesman, Mac Jeffery, confirmed that the company did license some of his patents, but claimed they were not for the floppy disk, which he claimed IBM invented on its own. Another IBM spokesman, Brian Doyle, said they licensed 14 patents from Nakamatsu, but also claimed that they do not have anything to do with the floppy disk.
History of the floppy disk
Floppy disks remained a popular medium for nearly 40 years, but their use was declining by the mid-1990s. The introduction of high speed computer networking and new formats like the USB thumbdrive led to the eventual disappearance of the floppy disk as a standard feature of microcomputers, with a notable point in this conversion being the introduction of the floppy-less iMac in 1998. After 2000, floppy disks were increasingly rare and used primarily with older hardware and especially with legacy industrial computer equipment.