Yoshiro Nakamatsu
Among Nakamatsu's early inventions is the Shoyu Churu Churu, a siphon pump used in the home to move soy sauce from large containers to smaller vessels for cooking and serving. His patented inventions include:
Based upon a patent issued in 1952, Nakamatsu claims to have invented the first floppy disk well before IBM's floppy disk patent was filed in 1969. However, what Nakamatsu patented in 1952 was a paper for optical sound player. In contrast to a floppy disk, this Nakamatsu patent discloses the use of printed paper for storage instead of the magnetic material of a floppy disk. It is not rewritable and lacks most elements of the IBM floppy disk patent. Since the paper was 'floppy' material, he claims he had invented the floppy disk (sometimes he uses the phrase "floppy media"); however, it should be noted that flexible magnetic recording media was well known prior to 1952, in tape and wire recording.
TRS-80
Radio Shack introduced floppy drives in July 1978, about six months after the Model I went on sale. The Model I disk operating system TRSDOS was written by Randy Cook under license from Radio Shack; Randy claims to have been paid $3000 for it. The first version released to the public was a buggy v2.0. This was quickly replaced by v2.1. required buying the Expansion Interface, which included a single-density floppy disk interface (with a formatted capacity of 85k) based on the Western Digital 1771 single-density floppy disk controller chip. The industry standard Shugart Associates SA-400 minifloppy disk drive was used. Four floppy drives could be daisy-chained to the Model I. The last drive in the chain was supposed to have a termination resistor installed but often it was not needed as it was integrated into later cables.