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.
SuperDisk
The SuperDisk's format was designed to supersede the floppy disk with its higher-capacity media that imitated the then ubiquitous format with its own 120 MB (and later 240 MB) disk storage while the SuperDisk drive itself was backwards compatible with 1.44 MB and 720 KB floppy formats (MFM). Superdisk drives read and write faster to these sorts of disks than conventional 1.44 MB or 720 KB floppy drives. The newer LS-240 drives also have the ability to read and write regular 1.44 MB floppies at much higher densities.