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
In 1991, Insite Peripherals introduced the "Floptical", which uses an infra-red LED to position the heads over marks in the disk surface. The original drive stores 21 MB, while also reading and writing standard DD and HD floppies. In order to improve data transfer speeds and make the high-capacity drive usefully quick as well, the drives are attached to the system using a SCSI connector instead of the normal floppy controller. This makes them appear to the operating system as a hard drive instead of a floppy, meaning that most PCs are unable to boot from them (because they aren't close enough in structure to bootable hard disks either). This again adversely affected pickup rates.