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.
Floppy disk variants
After only a short time on the market the product was pulled, as it was discovered there were a number of performance- and reliability problems that made the system essentially unusable. Sony then reengineered the device for a quick rerelease, but then extended the delay well into 1998 instead, and increased the capacity to "200 MB" (approximately 210 decimal megabytes) while they were at it. By this point the market was already saturated by the Zip disk, so it never gained much market share.