Something you don’t see every day.

In the early 1980s, there was a war between floppy disk formats — and Sony’s 3.5-inch disks came out on top.

This one here is one of the many losers: the 2.8-inch Quick Disk format by Mitsumi. Each side could hold 64KB, and you had to flip it over like the old 5¼-inch floppies. It used a spiral track, so there was no random access — all data was written in one long winding track, like on an audio cassette.

Nintendo took inspiration from this format to create its own proprietary disk for the Famicom Disk System.

This drive and these disks are not just part of my collection — they were one of the very first things I bought back in the ’90s for my childhood MSX computer, when I was still in high school and still had my Amiga 1200.

More info about this drive format

Disk drive for the 2.8-inch Quick Disk format by Mitsumi (Philips-branded), with two disks next to it: one inside its original cardboard sleeve, with my pencil notes on it; and the other without a sleeve, showing the exposed magnetic surface — not protected by any mechanism, like on 5¼-inch floppies — and also marked with some notes.