8-inch, 5 ¹⁄₄-inch, and 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks

8-inch, 5 ¹⁄₄-inch (full height), and 3 ¹⁄₂-inch drives

A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles. They are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).

Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch (200 mm) media and later in 5.25-inch (133 mm) and 3.5-inch (89 mm) sizes, were an ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s well into the first decade of the 21st century.^[1]

By 2010, computer motherboards were rarely manufactured with floppy drive support; 3 ¹⁄₂" floppies could be used as an external USB drive, but 5 ¹⁄₄", 8", and non-standard drives could only be handled by old equipment.

While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, portable external hard disk drives, optical discs, memory cards, and computer networks.

History[link]

8-inch disk drive with diskette (3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk for comparison)

3 ¹⁄₂-inch, high-density diskettes affixed with adhesive labels

The earliest floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (200 mm) in diameter;^[1] they became commercially available in 1971.^[2] These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation.^[3] The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970,^[4] and although in 1973 IBM announced its first media as "Type 1 Diskette" the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".

In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the first 5 ¹⁄₄-inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard and soft sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR. The 5 1/4 inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, and the hard sectored disk format disappeared. In 1984, IBM introduced the 1.2 MB dual sided floppy disk along with its AT model. IBM started using the 720 kB double density 3.5" microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer and the 1.44 MB high density version with the PS/2 line in 1986. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB "DSED" diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models but this was a commercial failure.

Throughout the early 1980s, limitations of the 5 ¹⁄₄-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be more practical than the 8-inch format, it was itself too large; as the quality of recording media grew, data could be stored in a smaller area.^[5] A number of solutions were developed, with drives at 2, 2 ¹⁄₂, 3 and 3 ¹⁄₂ inches (and Sony's 90.0 mm × 94.0 mm disk) offered by various companies.^[5] They all shared a number of advantages over the old format, including a rigid case with a sliding write protection tab, protecting them from damage; the large market share of the 5 ¹⁄₄-inch format made it difficult for these new formats to gain significant market share.^[5] A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted; by 1988 the 3 ¹⁄₂-inch was outselling the 5 ¹⁄₄-inch.^[6]

By the end of the 1980s, the 5 ¹⁄₄-inch disks had been superseded by the 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disks. By the mid-1990s, the 5 ¹⁄₄-inch drives had virtually disappeared as the 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. The advantages of the 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk were its smaller size and its plastic case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks.

Ubiquity[link]

Imation USB floppy drive, model 01946: an external drive that accepts high-density disks

Floppy disks became ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers and home computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups. Before hard disks became affordable, floppy disks were often used to store a computer's operating system (OS). Most home computers had a primary OS and BASIC stored as ROM, with the option of loading a more advanced disk operating system from a floppy disk. By the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were an estimated five billion floppy disks in use.^[7] Then, distribution of larger packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROM and online distribution (for smaller programs). An attempt to continue the floppy disk was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, with a capacity of 120 MB^[8] and backward compatible with standard 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high density removable disc products, although ultimately flash memory, recordable CDs/DVDs, and online storage would render the matter moot. External USB-based floppy disk drives are still available; many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such a drive.

Decline[link]

Mechanically incompatible higher-density disks were introduced, like the Iomega Zip disk. Adoption was limited by the competition between proprietary formats and the need to buy expensive drives for computers where the disks would be used. In some cases, failure in market penetration was exacerbated by release of higher-capacity versions of the drive and media not backward compatible with the original drives, dividing the users between new and old adopters. A chicken or the egg scenario ensued, with consumers wary of making costly investments into unproven and rapidly changing technologies, resulting in none of the technologies being able to prove themselves and stabilize their market presence. Recordable CDs with even greater capacity, compatible with existing infrastructure of CD-ROM drives, made the new floppy technologies redundant, their lack of reusability negated by their extremely low cost and countered by re-writeable CDs. Networking, advancements in flash-based devices and widespread adoption of USB provided another alternative that made optical storage obsolete for some purposes. The rise of file sharing and multi-megapixel digital photography encouraged the use of files larger than most 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disks could hold. Floppy disks were commonly used as sneakernet carriers for file transfer, but the broad availability of LANs and fast Internet connections provided a simpler and faster method of transferring such files. Other removable storage devices have advantages in both capacity and performance when network connections are unavailable or when networks are inadequate.

In 1991, Commodore introduced the CDTV, with a CD-ROM drive in place of the floppy drive. The kickstart of AmigaOS was stored in ROM as in other Amigas, meaning it didn't have to be installed via external media. Apple introduced the iMac in 1998 with a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive; this made USB-connected floppy drives popular accessories as the iMac came without any writeable removable media device. This transition from standard floppies was relatively easy for Apple, since all Macintosh models originally designed to use a CD-ROM drive could boot and install their operating system from CD-ROM early on. By 2002 most manufacturers still provided Floppy Disk Drives as standard equipment to meet user demand for file-transfer and an emergency boot device as well as the general secure feeling of having the familiar device.^[9] Subsequently, enabled by the widespread support for USB flash drives and BIOS boot, manufacturers and retailers progressively reduced the availability floppy disk drives as standard equipment. In February 2003, Dell announced floppy drives would no longer be pre-installed on Dell Dimension home computers, although they were still available as a selectable option and purchasable as an aftermarket OEM add-on.^[10] On 29 January 2007, PC World stated that only 2% of the computers they sold contained built-in floppy disk drives; once present stocks were exhausted, no more standard floppies would be sold.^[11] In 2009, Hewlett-Packard stopped supplying standard floppy drives on business desktops.^{[citation needed]}

Use in the early 21st century[link]

A floppy hardware emulator, same size as a 3 ¹⁄₂ drive, provides a USB interface to the user.

Screenshot of the toolbar in OpenOffice.org, highlighting the Save icon, which depicts a floppy disk

Floppy disks are used for emergency boots in aging systems lacking support for other bootable media, and for BIOS updates since most BIOS and firmware programs can still be executed from bootable floppy disks. If BIOS updates fail or become corrupt, floppy drives can sometimes be used to perform a recovery. The music and theatre industries still use equipment requiring standard floppy disks (e.g. synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, and lighting consoles). Industrial automation equipment such as programmable machinery and industrial robots may not have a USB interface; data and programs are then loaded from disks, damageable in industrial environments. This may not be replaced due to cost or requirement for continuous availability; existing software emulation and virtualization do not solve this problem because no operating system is present or a customized operating system is used that has no drivers for USB devices. Hardware floppy disk emulators can be made to interface floppy disk controllers to a USB port that can be used for flash drives; several manufacturers make such emulators.

For more than two decades, the floppy disk was the primary external writable storage device used. Most computing environments before the 1990s were non-networked and floppy disks were the primary means of transferring data between computers, a method known informally as sneakernet. Unlike hard disks, floppy disks are handled and seen; even a novice user can identify a floppy disk. Because of these factors, a picture of a 3 ¹⁄₂" floppy disk has become a metaphor for saving data. The floppy disk symbol is still used by software on user interface elements related to saving files, such as the release of Microsoft Office 2010, even though such disks are increasingly obsolete.^[12]

Design[link]

Internal parts of a 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disk. 1) A hole that indicates a high-capacity disk. 2) The hub that engages with the drive motor. 3) A shutter that protects the surface when removed from the drive. 4) The plastic housing. 5) A polyester sheet reducing friction against the disk media as it rotates within the housing. 6) The magnetic coated plastic disk. 7) A schematic representation of one sector of data on the disk; the tracks and sectors are not visible on actual disks. The write protection tab (unlabeled) is upper left.

Structure[link]

The 5 ¹⁄₄-inch disk has a large circular hole in the center for the drive's spindle and a small oval aperture in both sides of the plastic to allow the drive's heads to read and write data; the magnetic medium can be spun by rotating it from the middle hole. A small notch on the right of the disk identifies that it is writable, detected by a mechanical switch or phototransistor above it; if it is not present, the disk is read-only. Punch devices were sold to convert read-only disks to writable ones and enable writing on the unused side of single sided disks; such modified disks became known as flippy disks. Tape may be used over the notch to protect writable disks from unwanted writing. Oddly: this arrangement was the converse of the system used on 8 inch floppy discs where the notch had to be covered before the disc could be written to.

Another LED/photo-transistor pair located near the center of the disk detects the index hole once per rotation in the magnetic disk; it is used to detect the angular start of each track and whether or not the disk is rotating at the correct speed. Early 8-inch and 5 ¹⁄₄-inch disks had physical holes for each sector and were termed hard sectored disks. Later soft sectored disks had only one index hole, and sector position was determined by the disk controller or low level software from patterns marking the start of a sector. Generally, the same drives were used to read and write both types of disks, with only the disks and disk controllers differing. Some operating systems utilizing soft sectors, such as Apple DOS, did not use the index hole; the drives designed for such systems often lacked the corresponding sensor; this was mainly a hardware cost-saving measure.

Inside the disk are two layers of fabric, with the medium sandwiched in the middle. The fabric is designed to reduce friction between the medium and the outer casing, and catch particles of debris abraded off the disk to keep them from accumulating on the heads. The outer casing is usually a one-part sheet, double-folded with flaps glued or spot-welded together. The 8-inch disk had read-only logic that was the reverse of the 5 ¹⁄₄-inch disk, with the slot on the side having to be taped over to allow writing.

The core of the 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk is the same as the other two disks, but the front has only a label and a small aperture for reading and writing data, protected by the slider - a spring-loaded metal or plastic cover, pushed to the side on entry into the drive. Rather than having a hole in the center, it has a metal hub which mates to the spindle of the drive. Typical 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk magnetic coating materials are:^[13]

• DD: 2 µm magnetic iron oxide
• HD: 1.2 µm cobalt doped iron oxide
• ED: 3 µm Barium ferrite

Two holes at the bottom left and right indicate whether the disk is write-protected and whether it is high-density; these holes are spaced as far apart as the holes in punched A4 paper, allowing write-protected high-density floppies to be clipped into standard ring binders. A notch at top right ensures that the disk is in the correct orientation and an arrow at top left indicating direction of insertion. The drive usually has a button that when pressed ejects the disk with varying degrees of force, the discrepancy due to the ejection force provided by the spring of the slider cover. In IBM PC compatibles, a floppy disk may be inserted or ejected manually at any time. The drive has a 'change switch' that detects when a disc is ejected or inserted. Failure of this mechanical switch is a common source of disc corruption if a disc is changed and the drive (and hence the operating system) fails to notice.

One of the chief usability problems of the floppy disk is its vulnerability; even inside a closed plastic housing, the disk medium is highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes. As with all magnetic storage, it is vulnerable to magnetic fields. Blank disks have been distributed with an extensive set of warnings, cautioning the user not to expose it to dangerous conditions. Disks must not be roughly treated or removed from the drive while the magnetic media is still spinning, since doing so is likely to cause damage to the disk, drive head, or stored data. On the other hand, the 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy has been lauded for its mechanical usability by HCI expert Donald Norman:^[14]

"A simple example of a good design is the 3½-inch magnetic diskette for computers, a small circle of "floppy" magnetic material encased in hard plastic. Earlier types of floppy disks did not have this plastic case, which protects the magnetic material from abuse and damage. A sliding metal cover protects the delicate magnetic surface when the diskette is not in use and automatically opens when the diskette is inserted into the computer. The diskette has a square shape: there are apparently eight possible ways to insert it into the machine, only one of which is correct. What happens if I do it wrong? I try inserting the disk sideways. Ah, the designer thought of that. A little study shows that the case really isn't square: it's rectangular, so you can't insert a longer side. I try backward. The diskette goes in only part of the way. Small protrusions, indentations, and cutouts, prevent the diskette from being inserted backward or upside down: of the eight ways one might try to insert the diskette, only one is correct, and only that one will fit. An excellent design."

Operation[link]

The spindle motor from a 3 ¹⁄₂-inch unit

The read-write head from a 3 ¹⁄₂-inch unit

How the read-write head is applied on the floppy

Visualization of magnetic information on Floppy Disk (image recorded with CMOS-MagView)

A spindle motor in the drive rotates the magnetic medium at a certain speed, while a stepper motor-operated mechanism moves the magnetic read/write head(s) along the surface of the disk. Both read and write operations require the media to be rotating and the head to contact the disk media, an action accomplished by a "disk load" solenoid.^[15] To write data, current is sent through a coil in the head as the media rotates. The head's magnetic field aligns the magnetic particles directly below the head on the media. When the current is reversed the particles align in the opposite direction encoding the data digitally. To read data, the magnetic particles in the media induce a tiny voltage in the head coil as they pass under it. This small signal is amplified and sent to the floppy disk controller, which converts the streams of pulses from the media into data, checks it for errors, and sends it to the host computer system.

A blank "unformatted" diskette has a coating of magnetic oxide with no magnetic order to the particles. During formatting, the particles are aligned forming a pattern of magnetized tracks, each broken up into sectors, enabling the controller to properly read and write data. The tracks are concentric rings around the center, with spaces between tracks where no data is written; gaps with padding bytes are provided between the sectors and at the end of the track to allow for slight speed variations in the disk drive, and to permit better interoperability with disk drives connected to other similar systems. Each sector of data has a header that identifies the sector location on the disk. A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is written into the sector headers and at the end of the user data so that the disk controller can detect potential errors. Some errors are soft and can be resolved by automatically re-trying the read operation; other errors are permanent and the disk controller will signal a failure to the operating system if multiple attempts to read the data still fail.

After a disk is inserted, a catch or lever at the front of the drive is manually lowered to prevent the disk from accidentally emerging, engage the spindle clamping hub, and in two-sided drives, engage the second read/write head with the media. In some 5 ¹⁄₄-inch drives, insertion of the disk compresses and locks an ejection spring which partially ejects the disk upon opening the catch or lever. This enables a smaller concave area for the thumb and fingers to grasp the disk during removal. Newer 5 ¹⁄₄-inch drives and all 3 ¹⁄₂-inch drives automatically engage the spindle and heads when a disk is inserted, doing the opposite with the press of the eject button. On Apple Macintosh computers with built-in floppy drives, the ejection button is replaced by software controlling an eject motor which only does so when the operating system no longer needs to access the drive. The user could drag the image of the floppy drive to the trash can on the desktop to eject the disk. The first such drives were the slim "Twiggy" drives of the late Apple Lisa. In the case of a power failure or drive malfunction, a loaded disk can removed manually by inserting a straightened paper clip into a small hole at the drive's front panel, just as one would do with a CD-ROM drive in a similar situation. External 3 ¹⁄₂-inch drives from Apple were equipped with eject buttons; the button was ignored when the drive was plugged into a Mac, but not if the drive was used with an Apple II, as ProDOS did not support software-controlled ejection. Some other computer designs, such as the Commodore Amiga, monitor for a new disk continuously and have button ejection mechanisms.

Sizes[link]

Different sizes of floppy disks are fundamentally incompatible, and disks can fit only one size of drive. Drives with 3 ¹⁄₂-inch and 5¼-inch slots were available during the transition period between the sizes, but they contained two separate drive mechanisms. In addition, there are many subtle, usually software-driven incompatibilities between the two. 5 ¹⁄₄-inch disks formatted for use with Apple II computers would be unreadable and treated as unformatted on a Commodore. As computer platforms began to form, attempts were made at interchangeability. For example, the "Superdrive" included from the Macintosh SE to the Power Macintosh G3 could read, write and format IBM PC-format 3½-inch disks, but few IBM-compatible computers had drives that did the reverse. 8-inch, 5 ¹⁄₄-inch and 3 ¹⁄₂-inch drives were manufactured in a variety of sizes, most to fit standardized drive bays. Alongside the common disk sizes were non-classical sizes for specialized systems.

8-inch floppy disk[link]

The first floppy disk was 8 inches in diameter, and was protected by a flexible plastic jacket. IBM used this size as a way of loading microcode into mainframe processors, and the original 8 inch disk was not field-writeable. Rewriteable disks and drives became useful. Early microcomputers used for engineering, business, or word processing often used one or more 8 inch disk drives for removable storage; the CP/M operating system was developed for microcomputers with 8 inch drives.

An 8-inch disk could store about a megabyte; many microcomputer applications didn't need that much capacity on one disk, so a smaller size disk with lower-cost media and drives was feasible. The 5 1/4 inch drive succeeded the 8 inch size in many applications, and developed to about the same storage capacity as the original 8 inch size, using higher-density media and recording techniques.

[edit] 5 ¹⁄₄-inch floppy disk

Uncovered 5 ¹⁄₄-inch disk mechanism with disk inserted. The edge of the disk with the opening for the medium was inserted first, then the lever was turned to close the mechanism and engage the drive motor and heads

The head gap of an 80-track high-density (1.2 MB in the MFM format) 5 ¹⁄₄-inch drive is shorter than that of a 40-track double-density (360 kB) drive but can format, read and write 40-track disks well provided the controller supports double stepping or has a switch to do such a process. A blank 40-track disk formatted and written on an 80-track drive can be taken to its native drive without problems, and a disk formatted on a 40-track drive can be used on an 80-track drive. Disks written on a 40-track drive and then updated on an 80 track drive become unreadable on any 40-track drives due to track width incompatibility. The disks would work on both machines, with RadioShack TRS-80 Model I computers using one side and the Apple II machines the other, regardless available software which could make sense of the other format^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}. Double-sided disks could be used in drives for single-sided disks, one side at a time, by turning them over (flippy disks); more expensive dual-head drives which could read both sides without turning over were later produced, and later became used universally. Disks sold as single-sided had a magnetic coating to the same specification, but not of guaranteed quality, on both sides so that they were symmetrical and would not warp; if a notch was cut to disable write-protection of the reverse the coating was often of sufficiently good quality to use both sides.

A disk notcher used to convert single-sided 5.25-inch diskettes to double-sided

[edit] 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disk ("Microfloppy")

A 3 ¹⁄₂-inch 2.88 MB floppy disk drive. This capacity was never common, but the more common 1.44 MB drives looked almost identical.

3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disk were produced with a capacity of 720 KB, followed by what became the most common format, 1.44 MB. All disks had a rectangular hole which, if obstructed, write-enabled the disk. 1.44 MB disks had another hole which identified them as being of that capacity.

In IBM-compatible PCs, the three densities of 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks are backwards-compatible: higher density drives can read, write and format lower density media. It is physically possible to format a disk at the wrong density, although it will not work properly. Fresh disks manufactured as high density can theoretically be formatted at double density only if no information has been written on the disk in high density, or the disk has been thoroughly demagnetized with a bulk eraser, as the magnetic strength of a high density record is stronger and overrides lower density, remaining on the disk and causing problems.

Writing at different densities than disks were intended for, sometimes by altering or drilling holes, was possible but deprecated.

The holes on the right side of a 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk can be altered as to make some disk drives and operating systems treat the disk as one of higher or lower density, for bidirectional compatibility or economical reasons. Possible modifications include:^[16][17] Some computers, e.g. the PS/2 and Acorn Archimedes, ignored these holes altogether.^[18]

It is possible to make a 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disk drive be recognized by a system as a 5 ¹⁄₄-inch 360 kB or 1200 kB drive, and to read and write disks with the same number of tracks and sectors as those disks; this had some application in data exchange with obsolete CP/M systems.^{[citation needed]}

Other sizes[link]

Other smaller floppy size were proposed, especially for portable or pocket-sized devices that needed a smaller storage device. 3" discs similar in construction to 3 ¹⁄₂" were manufactured and used for a time, particularly by Amstrad computers and word processors. A 2-inch nominal size was introduced for compact pocket computers and was used with some electronic musical instrument controllers. Neither of these sizes became popular in personal computers.

Sizes, performance and capacity[link]

Floppy disk size is often referred to in inches, even in countries using metric and though the size is defined in metric. The ANSI specification of 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disks is entitled in part "90 mm (3.5 in)" though 90 mm is closer to 3.54 inches.^[19] Formatted capacities are generally set in terms of kilobytes and megabytes.

A box of about 80 floppy disks together with a USB memory stick capable of holding over 130 times as much data as the whole box of disks put together.

Data is generally written to floppy disks in sectors (angular blocks) and tracks (concentric rings at a constant radius). For example, the HD format of 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks uses 512 bytes per sector, 18 sectors per track, 80 tracks per side and two sides, for a total of 1,474,560 bytes per disk.^[32] Some disk controllers can vary these parameters at the user's request, increasing storage on the disk, although they may not be able to be read on machines with other controllers. For example, Microsoft applications were often distributed on 3 ¹⁄₂-inch 1.68 MB DMF disks formatted with 21 sectors instead of 18; they could still be recognized by a standard controller. On the IBM PC, MSX and most other microcomputer platforms, disks were written using a Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) format,^[31] with the disk spinning at a constant speed and the sectors hold the same amount of information on each track regardless of radial location.

This was not the most efficient way to use the disk surface with available drive electronics;^{[citation needed]} because the sectors have constant angular size, the 512 bytes in each sector are compressed more near the disk's center. A more space-efficient technique would be to increase the number of sectors per track toward the outer edge of the disk, from 18 to 30 for instance, thereby keeping constant the amount of physical disk space used for storing each sector; an example is zone bit recording. Apple implemented this in early Macintosh computers by spinning the disk slower when the head was at the edge, while maintaining the data rate, allowing 400 kB of storage per side and an extra 160 kB on a double-sided disk.^{[citation needed]} This higher capacity came with a disadvantage: the format used a unique drive mechanism and control circuitry, meaning that Mac disks could not be read on other computers. Apple eventually reverted to constant angular velocity on HD floppy disks with their later machines, still unique to Apple as they supported the older variable-speed formats.

Disk formatting is usually done by a utility program supplied by the computer OS manufacturer; generally, it sets up a file storage directory system on the disk, and initializes its sectors and tracks. Areas of the disk unusable for storage due to flaws can be locked (marked as "bad sectors") so that the operating system does not attempt to use them. This was time consuming so many environments had quick formatting which skipped the error checking process. When floppy disks were often used, disks pre-formatted for popular computers were sold. A formatted floppy disk does not include the sector and track headings of an unformatted disk; the difference in storage between them depends on the drive's application. Floppy disk drive and media manufacturers specify the unformatted capacity (for example, 2 MB for a standard 3 ¹⁄₂-inch HD floppy). It is implied that this should not be exceeded, since doing so will most likely result in performance problems. DMF was introduced permitting 1.68 MB to fit onto an otherwise standard 3 ¹⁄₂-inch disk; utilities then appeared allowing disks to be formatted as such.

Mixtures of decimal prefixes and binary sector sizes require care to properly calculate total capacity. Whereas semiconductor memory naturally favors powers of two (size doubles each time an address pin is added to the integrated circuit), the capacity of a disk drive is the product of sector size, sectors per track, tracks per side and sides (which in hard disk drives can be greater than 2). Although other sector sizes have been known in the past, formatted sector sizes are now almost always set to powers of two (256 bytes, 512 bytes, etc.), and in some cases, disk capacity is calculated as multiples of the sector size rather than in just bytes, leading to a combination of decimal multiples of sectors and binary sector sizes. For example, 1.44 MB 3 ¹⁄₂-inch HD disks have the "M" prefix peculiar to their context, coming from their capacity of 2,880 512-byte sectors (1,440 kB), inconsistent with either a decimal megabyte nor a binary mebibyte (MiB). Hence, these disks hold 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB. Usable data capacity is a function of the disk format used, which in turn is determined by the FDD controller and its settings. Differences between such formats can result in capacities ranging from approximately 1,300 to 1760 kB (1.80 MB) on a "standard" 3 ¹⁄₂-inch high density floppy (and up to nearly 2 MB with utilities such as 2MGUI). The highest capacity techniques require much tighter matching of drive head geometry between drives, something not always possible and unreliable. For example, the LS-240 drive supports a 32 MB capacity on standard 3 ¹⁄₂-inch HD disks,^{[citation needed]} but it is, however, a write-once technique, and requires its own drive.

The raw maximum transfer rate of 3 ¹⁄₂-inch HD floppy drives and interfaces, disregarding overheads, is as much as 1000 kilobit/s, or approximately 83% that of single-speed CDROM (71% of audio CD). This represents the speed of raw data bits moving under the read head; however, because of the very high amount of overhead in the system (use of soft sectors with headers, sync issues preventing sequential reads of an entire 18-sector track in a single rotation, etc.), the actual user data read/write speed is much lower. In fact, a DSHD diskette formatted with an efficient non-sequential (interleaved or "twist") sector layout could sync and read an average of only slightly more than three double-sided pairs of 512-byte sectors per 0.2s revolution, or a little over 15 sectors/second, for an effective data rate of approximately 125 kbit/s. At this speed, a single, disk-filling file would take a good 90 seconds to transfer; smaller and/or fragmented files further reduced transfer speed because of the slow head seek speed and the requirement to re-read the FAT from Track 0 along with any folder data, as removable media is rarely cached. Unusually, when compared to hard disks, optical drives and archive tapes, the floppy disk standard proper did not receive any further successful speed or capacity upgrades throughout its period of relevance, from the mid-80s introduction of DSHD through to its eventual death more than 20 years later.

However, some developments did seek to improve this, but with limited success. Double-sided extended-density (DSED) 3 ¹⁄₂-inch floppy disks, introduced by Toshiba in 1987 and adopted by IBM on the PS/2 in 1994, doubled the number of sectors per track, thereby providing double the data rate and capacity of conventional DSHD 3 ¹⁄₂-inch drives.^[31] Although it was not enabled by default, both the MSDOS/Windows 3.1 "Smartdrive" caching TSR and the system cache of later Windows versions can be configured to cache removable drives, including floppy disks. Similarly, some USB floppy drives use caching to increase performance while being built from standard speed drives; alternatively, the X10 accelerated floppy drive was an attempt to physically increase floppy performance by increasing spindle RPM.

More successfully, a number of (typically QIC-standard) tape-based backup drives that interfaced via the floppy drive controller were developed and sold by manufacturers such as Travan and Iomega. These made better use of the available bandwidth, and eventually pushed the 500/1000 kbit/s limits of standard (DD/HD) motherboard floppy disk controllers; higher end models could make use of the 2000 kbit/s bandwidth of DSED controllers, and plug-in "high speed" adapter cards were offered for PCs lacking this capability. Though inadequate by modern standards, their speed was competitive with early CD recorders and Zip drives, and was sufficient for overnight backups of a contemporary home or small office users' hard drive.

See also[link]

• dd (Unix)
• Disk image
• Don't Copy That Floppy
• Semi-virtual diskette

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Weyhrich, Steven (2005). "The Disk II": A detailed essay describing one of the first commercial floppy disk drives (from the Apple II History website)
• Immers, Richard; Neufeld, Gerald G. (1984). Inside Commodore DOS. The Complete Guide to the 1541 Disk Operating System. DATAMOST, Inc & Reston Publishing Company, Inc. (Prentice-Hall). ISBN 0-8359-3091-2.
• Englisch, Lothar; Szczepanowski, Norbert (1984). The Anatomy of the 1541 Disk Drive. Grand Rapids, MI: Abacus Software (translated from the original 1983 German edition, Düsseldorf: Data Becker GmbH). ISBN 0-916439-01-1.
• Hewlett Packard: 9121D/S Disc Memory Operator's Manual; Printed 1 September 1982; Part No. 09121-90000

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Floppy disk

• Programming Floppy Disk Controllers
• HowStuffWorks: How Floppy Disk Drives Work
• Computer Hope: Information about computer floppy drives
• NCITS (mention of ANSI X3.162 and X3.171 floppy standards)
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The Residents are an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of The Residents was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, The Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant-garde music, was started by The Residents.

Throughout the group's existence, the individual members have ostensibly attempted to operate under anonymity, preferring instead to have attention focused on their art output. Much outside speculation and rumor has focused on this aspect of the group. In public, the group appears silent and costumed, often wearing eyeball helmets, top hats and tuxedos - a long-lasting costume now recognized as their signature iconography. Their albums generally fall into two categories: deconstructions of Western popular music, or complex conceptual pieces, composed around a theme, theory or plot. They are noted for surrealistic lyrics and sound, disregard for conventional music composition, and the over the top, theatrical spectacle of their live performances.

History[link]

Origins[link]

The Residents hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, where they met in high school in the 1960s. In 1966 the members headed west for San Francisco, but after their truck broke down in San Mateo, California, they decided to remain there.

While attempting to make a living, they began to experiment with tape machines, photography, and anything remotely to do with art that they could get their hands on. Word of their experimentation spread and in 1969, a British guitarist and multi-instrumentalist named Phil Lithman^[1] and the mysterious N. Senada (whom Lithman had picked up in Bavaria where the aged avant-gardist was recording birds singing) paid them a visit, and decided to remain.

The two Europeans would become great influences on the band. Lithman's guitar playing technique earned him the nickname Snakefinger, after his frantic playing on the violin during the performance with the Residents at The Boarding House in San Francisco 1971, where his fingers' speed made them look like snakes in the eyes of the less-musically proficient, but imaginative Residents.

The group purchased crude recording equipment, instruments and began to make tapes, refusing to let an almost complete lack of musical proficiency stand in the way. Like all information pertaining to the early days of the band, this is provided by The Cryptic Corporation and may or may not be invented.

1969–1972: Residents Unincorporated[link]

In 1969 the group began to make the first of their unreleased tapes. Rumors have surfaced of two (of perhaps hundreds) unreleased reel-to-reel items titled Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger. The actual titles are in question (as is the notion that these were album-length recordings), but the first title has been confirmed by a former head of the now defunct Smelly Tongues fan club. Further evidence of pre-1970 recordings surfaced with the release of the song I Heard You Got Religion, supposedly recorded in 1969, and released originally as a downloadable track from Ralph America in 1999. Cryptic says there are lots of tapes dating back decades, but they were all recorded before the group had officially become The Residents so the band does not consider them to be part of their discography.

The album The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger has never been released in any form.^[2] "Uncle Willie", former Residents fan club president, wrote in his book Uncle Willie's Highly Opinionated Guide to The Residents that, while searching through the band's archives, he came across "a suite named The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger," but not a complete album.

In 1971 the group sent a reel-to-reel tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers, since he had worked with Captain Beefheart (one of the group's musical heroes). Halverstadt was not overly impressed with the Warner Bros. Album (He describes it as "okay at best" in Uncle Willie's Cryptic Guide to the Residents), but awarded the tape an "A for Ariginality". Because the band had not included any name in the return address, the rejection slip was simply addressed to "The Residents". The members of the group then decided that this would be the name they would use, first becoming "Residents Unincorporated", then shortening it to the current name.

The first performance of the band using the name "The Residents" was at The Boarding House in San Francisco in 1971. That same year another tape was completed called Baby Sex. The original cover art for the tape box was a silk-screened copy of an old photo depicting a woman fellating a small child. (Considered artistically rude at that time, it would be viewed as child pornography today).

In 1972 they moved to San Francisco and formed Ralph Records.^[3] By this time, The Cryptic Corporation was operating as a partnership and incorporated to take over the running of Ralph Records.

1972–1980: Album era[link]

Before the Santa Dog single and while recording Meet the Residents, The Residents undertook one of their first major projects: the ambitious Vileness Fats film project. Intended to be the first-ever long form music video, The Residents saw this project as the opportunity to create the ultimate cult film. After four years of filming (from 1972 to 1976) the project was reluctantly canceled because of time, space and monetary constraints. Fifteen hours of footage were shot for the project yet only about three-quarters of an hour of that footage has ever been released.

Santa Dog is considered by The Residents themselves and their fans to be the "official" start of the band's recorded output. This is so because it was the first to be released to the public. Shortly after this release, the band left San Mateo and relocated to San Francisco. They sent copies of Santa Dog to west coast radio stations with no response until Bill Reinhardt, program director of KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon received a copy. Santa Dog had the strange kind of sonic weirdness he was looking for and it was played heavily on his popular (Radio Lab) show. Bill met The Residents at their Sycamore St. studio in the summer of 1973 with the news of his broadcasts. They were overjoyed that they had finally got media acceptance and he was celebrated with the news that KBOO was the first station to play a Residents record on the air. Inviting him in and treating him like family, The Residents gave Reinhardt exclusive access to all their eclectic recordings, including copies of the original masters of Stuffed Trigger, Baby Sex and the Warner Bros. Album. He promoted these along with Meet the Residents regularly on his radio program. There was considerable resistance to the commercial viability of Residents material. To aid in their promotion, Bill was given 50 of the first 1,000 copies of Meet the Residents. Some were sent to friends, listeners and critics and two dozen were left for sale on consignment at Music Millennium Records where they sat unsold for months. KBOO DJ, Barry Schwam (Schwump, who also recorded with The Residents) promoted them on his program as well. Eventually KBOO airplay attracted many loyal fans and Portland became the epicenter of a worldwide cult phenomenon.

The Residents, at this time, were at a rough point in their career. According to official Residents lore, there was internal turmoil which resulted in a large, "embarrassing" food fight; they decided to resolve this tension in 1974 by recording what would later become Not Available —representative of N. Senada's Theory of Obscurity taken to its logical conclusion. The album was recorded and then placed in storage in order to be issued only when everyone had forgotten about it. However, contractual obligations related to the much-delayed release of Eskimo forced its release in 1978 after the band had almost forgotten about it. The Residents were not bothered by this deviation from their plan since the 1978 decision to release the album would not affect the philosophical conditions under which it was originally recorded.

The Third Reich 'n Roll came next, a pastiche on 1960s rock and roll with an overarching Nazi theme, represented visually on the album cover, which featured Dick Clark in an SS uniform holding a carrot, with a number of Hitlers dancing on clouds behind him. On each side of the record was a single composition, approximately 17½ minutes long, using recordings of classic rock and roll songs that were spliced, overdubbed and edited with new vocals, instrumentation and tape noises.^[3] The original songs were finally removed leaving entirely new and bizarre performances. The music video for this album was shot on the sets that were built for Vileness Fats.

Following The Third Reich 'n' Roll came Fingerprince, a particularly ambitious project not unlike the earlier Not Available recordings. The band's original intention with Fingerprince was to release it as the very first "three-sided" album – they had found a way to simulate a third side by arranging the grooves on one side of the vinyl album to play a completely different program of tracks depending on which series of grooves the needle was dropped on. However, this idea was dropped when the band discovered that the Monty Python comedy troupe had executed the very same idea three years earlier with their Matching Tie and Handkerchief album. The "third side" was later released as an EP titled Babyfingers, and the Babyfingers tracks have since been re-integrated into the Fingerprince album on the CD reissues.

The Residents followed Fingerprince with their Duck Stab/Buster & Glen album – their most easily comprehensible album up to that point. This album got the band some attention from the press (namely NME, Sounds and Melody Maker), and dropped most of their reliance upon the Theory of Obscurity.

Eskimo (1979) contained music consisting of non-musical sounds, percussion, and wordless voices. Rather than being songs in the orthodox sense, the compositions sounded like "live-action stories" without dialogue. The Residents remixed the "songs" in disco style, the results of which appeared on the EP Diskomo. Eskimo was reissued in surround sound on DVD in 2003. Eskimo's cover presents the first instance of the group wearing their signature eyeball masks and tuxedos, which would be featured in many subsequent releases, films, live appearances, and promotional materials.

Commercial Album (1980) consisted of 40 songs, each consisting of a verse and a chorus and lasting one minute.^[3] The songs pastiched the advertising jingle although the songs were not endorsements of known products or services. The liner notes state that songs should be repeated three times in a row to form a "pop song". The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station at the time, KFRC, such that the station played each track of their album over three days. This prompted an editorial in Billboard magazine questioning whether the act was art or advertising.

When MTV was in its infancy, The Residents' videos were in heavy rotation since they were among the few music videos available to broadcasters. The Residents' earliest videos are in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection and were eventually released together in 2001 on the Icky Flix DVD, which includes an optional audio track of remixes.

1981-1990: Performance art and concept albums[link]

The Mole Trilogy and The Mole Show (1981-83)[link]

In 1981, a trilogy of albums, starting with Mark of the Mole, was to be released.^[3] A tour ensued, and was narrated nightly by Penn Jillette. The Mole Trilogy is made up of parts I, II and IV. The performance featured The Residents performing behind a burlap screen, occasionally wearing disguises (such as their iconic eyeball masks), while dancers and actors appeared in front of painted backdrops used to help illustrate the story. Penn Jillette would come out between songs telling long intentionally pointless stories. The show was designed to appear to fall apart as it progressed: Penn pretended to grow angrier with the crowd, and lighting effects and music would become increasingly chaotic, all building up to the point where Penn was dragged off stage and returned, handcuffed to a wheelchair, to deliver his last monologue. During one performance, an audience member assaulted Penn while he was handcuffed to the wheelchair.

The 13th anniversary show (1985-86)[link]

After their Japanese distributor approached them for a two-week run in Japan, The Residents created the 13th Anniversary tour. While the musical performance was more mainstream, the stage show was another over-the-top spectacle, featuring inflatable giraffes, dancers in eye ball masks illuminating the darkened stage with work lights, and a lead vocalist who seemed to change costumes throughout the show from wearing his eyeball mask to wearing a Richard Nixon mask, and at one point wearing only a wig and fake ears. After the two-week run in Japan, the Residents took the show through the US. During the US leg of the tour the band encountered a few problems, including having the tour manager having to fan a member's keyboard because of overheating, being booked in a pool hall and having someone run on stage only to be thrown back into the audience.

Backstage at the Hollywood Palace show on December 26, 1985, one member's eyeball mask (Mr. Red Eye) was stolen, so it was replaced with a giant skull mask.^{[citation needed]} The eye was returned by a devoted fan who discovered where the thief lived and stole it back, although Homer Flynn said the person who returned the mask was most probably the thief. It was put into retirement because they said it was "unclean" and in a bad condition—a superfluous shell. After this, the lead Resident was known as Mr. Skull.^{[citation needed]}

The last show of this tour was in January 1987 at The Warfield in San Francisco, with a special appearance by Penn & Teller.^{[citation needed]}

Cube E (1989-1990)[link]

"Cube E" was a three-act performance covering the history of American music. It was a step up from previous shows, featuring more elaborate dance numbers and sets. It was also the first show composed exclusively of music written for the show. The show was almost entirely backlit, with blacklights highlighting fluorescent pieces of costumes and set.

They introduced the first part, which covered cowboy music, on German television as "Buckaroo Blues". It featured the singer and two dancers wearing giant cowboy hats around a glowing campfire. Part two was called "Black Barry" and focused on slave music and the blues. The act ended when a giant cube head rose from the back of the stage. Part three, "The Baby King," featured Elvis songs performed by an elderly Elvis impersonator for his grandchildren. The show ended with an inflated Elvis dying as a result of the British Invasion.

Other works[link]

In the late 1980s, they created the epic recording God in Three Persons, a story about the exploitation of two Siamese twins with healing powers by a male dominant force and The King & Eye, a surreal biography of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll.

1991-97: Multimedia projects[link]

In the 1990s, they created Freak Show. This marked the beginning of The Residents' obsession with emerging computer technology in the 1990s.^[3] Much of the music was made with MIDI devices. Freak Show also served as the name for a CD-ROM released by the Voyager Company on January 1994^[4], shortly after Laurie Anderson's first multimedia CD-ROM experiment, Puppet Motel. Freak Show was also a stage performance by a theater company at the Archa Theater in Prague that premiered on November 1, 1995, and a comic book. Several of the songs were also performed live during the 1997 25th anniversary concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco. After the CD-ROM's success, the album was re-released as The Freak Show Soundtrack with a different cover. A limited edition, The Freak Show Special Edition, was released in 2002 to mark their 30th anniversary.

Other multimedia projects by The Residents included The Gingerbread Man and Bad Day on the Midway.

1998-2008: Tours and storytelling projects[link]

Wormwood (1998-99)[link]

Based on Bible stories, Wormwood featured the Residents departing from pre-programmed music and again using a live band. The band wore ecclesiastical robes and performed in a brightly lit fluorescent cave. The male and female lead singers switched leads, depending on what characters they needed. Act one consisted of one-off stories about individual Bible characters. Act 2 focused on suites of songs about Bible figures such as Abraham, Moses, and King David. During a performance in Athens, Greece, Nolan Cook, their guitarist, had to leave the stage after taking a rock to the head from an audience member.

Demons Dance Alone and Animal Lover (2002-05)[link]

The Residents recorded the dramatic album Demons Dance Alone (also a tour and DVD in 2002) and Animal Lover in 2005. Singer Molly Harvey began as a Ralph employee but by the mid-90s contributed to virtually all of The Residents' many projects. The Residents' increased reliance on Harvey, essentially handing her half of the vocal duties since at least Demons Dance Alone, parallels their artistic revitalization. Nolan Cook, Carla Fabrizio, Toby Dammit, Eric Drew Feldman, and many other artists continuously worked with the band over the last five years, recording and performing live. The new artists helped to counter what Allmusic derided as a "sonic palette [confined to] factory presets from their new Macintosh audio" of the CD-ROM era.^[5]

In February 2005, The Residents toured Australia as part of the What is Music? festival, performing a two hour retrospective set titled the 33rd Anniversary Tour: The Way We Were. These shows saw a fairly minimal band; three eyeball-headed Residents (one on guitar and two laptop/sample operators), a "stage hand" performer, and a male and female vocalist in costumes reminiscent of the Wormwood Tour. Video projections and unusual flexible screens were added to the stage set, creating an unsettling ambiance. The performances on the Way We Were tour were recorded and were released on CD and DVD in 2005.

Storytelling projects (2006-09)[link]

Summer of 2006 brought the internet download project, River of Crime (Episodes 1–5). River of Crime was their first project with Warner Music Group's Cordless Label. Following the success of River of Crime, The Residents launched their weekly Timmy video project on YouTube. In 2007 they did the music for the documentary Strange Culture and also released a double instrumental album, Night of the Hunters. On the Fourth of July, 2007, the planned October release of their latest project with Mute Records, The Voice of Midnight (a music theater adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story "Der Sandmann"), was announced on their website.

On the May 21 they announced on their website that their first North America tour since Demons Dance Alone for a project titled The Bunny Boy was set to begin on October 9 in New York – later an earlier date was added for Santa Cruz. Soon, it was announced that the tour would also include Europe, starting November 13. On June 3, the Residents.com website boasted the planned release of The Bunny Boy which was released on September 1. The website had posted information in which Foxboro claimed this would be a Farewell Tour; it was later revealed that this was nothing more than a mistake by Foxboro.

November 3, 2009 saw three new releases. The Ughs! is a mostly instrumental album made up of music composed earlier in their career, which had been completely reworked for the Voice of Midnight album. Ten Little Piggies is a futurist compilation, ten songs from projects that may or may not be released in the future. Finally Is Anybody Out There is a DVD collecting all the Bunny Boy videos from the series posted on YouTube. The episodes are streamlined and not exactly the same as the originals.

2010-present: Talking Light and beyond[link]

In January 2010 the Residents began a series of tours titled Talking Light, touring North America and Europe. During the tours, which lasted until April 2011, The Residents appeared as a trio (with the explanation that the fourth member "Carlos" had grown tired of the music business and "gone home" to Mexico to care for his mother) and adapted new identities and costumes. The singer, Randy, wore an old man mask, and the other two, keyboardist Chuck and guitarist Bob, wore dread lock wigs and some kind of illuminated optical gear over their faces. The songs were stories about various characters' obsessions with ghosts, imaginary people and supernatural phenomena. One of these performances was featured as part of the edition of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival curated by Matt Groening in May 2010 in Minehead, England. The band released several albums related to the Talking Light concept, including the instrumental albums Dollar General and Chuck's Ghost Music, live album Bimbo's Talking Light, and studio album Lonely Teenager.

In October and November 2011, the Residents presented an early version ofSam's Enchanted Evening at The Marsh performance center in Berkeley, with the lead singer appearing as Randy Rose.^[6]. A new version of "Sam's Enchanted Evening" was subsequently performed in March 2012 at Henry Street Settlement in New York City in a production directed by Travis Chamberlain, co-starring Joshua Raoul Brody and Jibz Cameron (aka, Dynasty Handbag).

On January 10, 2012, The Residents released "Coochie Brake"; it focused on an ambient, slightly ethnic sound, with lyrics in Spanish spoken by, apparently, a new singer.

Identity[link]

Much of the speculation about the members' true identities swirls around their management team, known as "The Cryptic Corporation."^[7] Cryptic was formed as a corporation in California by Jay Clem (born 1947), Homer Flynn (born April 1945), Hardy W. Fox (born 1945), and John Kennedy in 1976, all of whom denied having been band members. (Clem and Kennedy left the Corporation in 1982, much to the chagrin of some fans.^[8]) The Residents themselves do not grant interviews, though Flynn and Fox have conducted interviews with the media.

Nolan Cook, a prominent collaborator with the group in both their live and studio work (as well as being a live member of I Am Spoonbender), denied in an interview that Fox and Flynn are the Residents, saying that he has come across such rumors, and they are completely false. However, Cook himself is considered a member of the band by some, as he is known to wear the same head coverings as the rest of the group during live shows, even wearing the trademark eyeball mask during the Wormwood tour.

William Poundstone, author of the Big Secrets books, compared voiceprints of a Flynn lecture with those of spoken word segments from the Residents discography in his book Biggest Secrets. After noting similar patterns in both, he concluded "the similarities in the spectograms second the convincing subjective impression that the voices are identical." He posited that "It is possible that the creative core of the Residents is the duo of Flynn and Fox." A subset of that belief is that Flynn is the lyricist and that Fox writes the music. In addition BMI's online database of the performance rights organization (of which the Residents and their publishing company, Pale Pachyderm Publishing (Warner-Chappell), have been members for their entire careers), lists Flynn and Fox as the composers of all original Residents songs. This includes those songs written pre-1974 (the "Residents Unincorporated" years), the year Cryptic formed.^[9]

Simon Reynolds wrote in his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 that "The Residents and their 'representatives' were one and the same",^[10] elaborating on one of his blogs that "this was something that anybody who had any direct dealings with Ralph figured out sooner rather than later." Reynolds quotes Helios Creed, who identifies The Residents as a keyboardist named "H", a singer named Homer, and "this other guy called John"; and Peter Principle of Tuxedomoon, who claims that "we eventually figured out that the guy doing the graphics and the engineer in the studio were in fact the Residents."^[11]

Cryptic openly admits the group's artwork is done by Flynn (among others), under various names that, put together, become Pornographics, but the pseudonym is rarely spelled the same way twice (examples: Porno Graphics, Pore No Graphix, Pore-Know Graphics); and that Fox is the "sound engineer" — meaning that he is the main producer, engineer, master, and editor of all their recordings. (Since 1976, the Residents' recordings have all listed their producer as "The Cryptic Corporation," presumably meaning Fox in particular.) Many other rumors have come and gone over the years, one being that 60s experimental band Cromagnon shared members with the band.

Most recently, the group's Facebook presence lists the members of the Residents as "Randy, Chuck and Bob." Furthermore, a synopsis for their 2012 stage production Sam's Enchanted Evening provides the name Randy Rose as that of "the Residents' lead singer." While it is clear that the Cryptic Corporation has chosen to share this information publicly, no further confirmation--nor any context as to the roles of "Chuck" and "Bob" in the group, or if these names are, indeed, the names of the group's members--appears to have been issued to date.

Discography[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Meet the Residents – America's most eccentric band!, Ian Shirley, SAF Publishing, Wembley, UK, 1998 ISBN 0-946719-12-8
• Richard Gehr (April 1986). Take a good hard look at America's preeminent underground avant-pop ensemble — you might like what you see. Spin Magazine. p. 59. http://books.google.com/books?id=xdLsQBjl0-IC&pg=PA59&dq=spin+magazine+1986+take+a+good+hard+look&hl=en&ei=9PWLTObxDo30swO-nbymBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2010-09-11. 

External links[link]

• The Residents Official Historical Site
• Official MySpace page
• Official YouTube page
• Residents Lovers Forum
• The Moles present The Residents

Derrick Rose

No. 1 – Chicago Bulls
Point guard
Personal information
Born	(1988-10-04) October 4, 1988 (age 23) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
High school	Simeon Career Academy
Listed height	6 ft 3 in (1.91 m)
Listed weight	190 lb (86 kg)
Career information
College	Memphis (2007–2008)
NBA Draft	2008 / Round: 1 / Pick: 1st overall
Selected by the Chicago Bulls
Pro career	2008–present
Career history
2008–present	Chicago Bulls
Career highlights and awards
NBA Most Valuable Player (2011) NBA Rookie of the Year (2009) 3× NBA All-Star (2010–2012) All-NBA First Team (2011) NBA All-Rookie First Team (2009) NBA All-Star Weekend Skills Challenge Champion (2009)

Derrick Martell Rose (born October 4, 1988) is an American professional basketball player for the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Born in Chicago, Rose learned the game of basketball from his three older brothers.^[1] In high school, he won two state championships and was rated by scouts as the top point guard prospect in the country after graduation.^{[citation needed]} He played for the University of Memphis Tigers and reached the NCAA national championship game in 2008. Shortly after, Rose declared for the 2008 NBA Draft and was selected first overall by the Chicago Bulls.^[2] In his first year of professional basketball, Rose was voted the Rookie of the Year^[3] and was selected to the All-Rookie Team.^[4] In his second season, Rose was selected as an NBA All-Star for the 2010 NBA All-Star Game;^[5] he was also named a starter for the U.S. team at the 2010 FIBA World Championships.^[6] Since being drafted, Rose has led the Bulls to the NBA Playoffs every year. In 2011, he received the NBA Most Valuable Player Award, becoming the youngest player ever to win this award. He joined Michael Jordan as the only Chicago Bulls players to win the honor.

In 2009, an NCAA investigation revealed that Rose's SAT scores had been invalidated, making him retroactively ineligible to play for Memphis. As a result, the NCAA vacated Memphis's entire 2007–08 season.^[7][8]

Early life[link]

Derrick Rose was born and raised in the Englewood area, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. He was Brenda Rose's fourth son after Dwayne, Reggie and Allan, but the first in seven years. All three were talented basketball players who taught Rose the in and outs of basketball on nearby courts.^[1] As his talent for the sport grew, Rose began to attract much more outside attention in Chicago's basketball circles, leading his mother and brothers to restrict outside contact to him, fearing his road to the NBA would be exploited and derailed by outside parties such as street agents, such as with the case with former Chicago prospect Ronnie Fields.^[9]

High school[link]

By the time Rose enrolled at Simeon Career Academy in 2003, he was a hot commodity for collegiate coaches. Despite his reputation, he played freshmen and JV basketball for the Wolverines. He wore No. 25 in honor of Ben "Benji" Wilson, a former promising player who was murdered by a gang member during his senior year in 1984.^[10] Rose wasn't allowed on varsity due to a long-standing tradition that head coach Bob Hambric, who had been with the school since 1980 had: no freshman on the varsity team. That rule didn't lessen Rose's play and he went on to put up 18.5 points, 6.6 assists, 4.7 rebounds and 2.1 steals per game and led both the freshmen and sophomores to city championships with a 24–1 record.^[11] Hambric softened his stance and allowed the freshman a chance to play on varsity in the state tournament, but Rose declined, wanting the players to get due credit.^[12] The next year Hambric retired and Robert Smith was hired, opening the path to varsity. In Rose's much-publicized debut, he had 22 points, 7 rebounds and 5 steals over Thornwood High School in a sold-out game filled with college scouts and coaches.^[13] He led the Wolverines to a 30–5 mark while averaging 19.8 points, 5.1 rebounds, 8.3 assists and 2.4 steals but the season ended after a loss in state regionals. Rose's play garnered him his first national award: a Parade Third Team All-American spot.^[14]

During Rose's junior year in 2006, the Simeon Wolverines broke through and won the Chicago Public League championship held at the United Center where Rose starred with 25 points and crowd pleasing dunks. The team advanced through the playoffs and earned a berth in the Class AA state championship against Richwoods High School, where a fourth quarter buzzer beater by Richwood forced overtime. The score was knotted at 29 late in the extra period when Rose stole the ball and buried the game winning jumper as time expired, giving Simeon its first state title since the Wilson-led Wolverines won in 1984. The team finished 33–4, nationally ranked^[15] and Rose was awarded with an All-State Illinois mention, EA Sports All-American Second Team pick^[16] and another Parade All-American selection.^[17]

Entering his senior year, Rose was ranked the fifth best prospect in the nation by Sports Illustrated. In January 2007, Simeon traveled to Madison Square Garden in New York City in January 2007 to play Rice High School and star guard Kemba Walker.^[18] The Wolverines, however, lost 53–51.^[19][20] The season's highlight was a nationally televised contest on ESPN against Virginia perennial power Oak Hill Academy two weeks later. Matched up with hyped junior guard Brandon Jennings, Rose had 28 points, 9 assists, and 8 rebounds and held Jennings to zero points in the first three quarters, 17 overall in a 78–75 win.^[21][22] For his performance, USA Today named him their high school player of the week.^[23] Simeon went on to repeat as Public League champions^[24] and defended their state championship, defeating O'Fallon High School 77–54.^[25] In doing so, Simeon became the first Chicago Public League school to win two straight state championships. In his final high school game, Rose scored 2 points, but pulled down 7 rebounds and totaled 8 assists. As a result, Simeon big man Tim Flowers scored 35 points.^[26] The Wolverines ended the season 33–2 and ranked 1st in the nation by Sports Illustrated^[27] and 6th on USA Today's Super 25.^[28] Rose averaged 25.2 points, 9.1 assists, 8.8 rebounds and 3.4 steals.

Overall Simeon's record while Rose played was 120–12.^[11] After his senior year, Rose was again All-State after being named Illinois Mr. Basketball^[29] and was named to the McDonald's All-American team.^[30] He was also awarded with First Team honors by Parade selection and USA Today^[31] and USA Today First Team All-American. Rose was selected to play in the Jordan Brand All-Star Game and Nike Hoop Summit. In 2009, Rose was named the decade's third greatest high school point guard by ESPN RISE magazine behind Chris Paul and T.J. Ford,^[32] and had his jersey number (#25) retired along with Ben Wilson.^[33]

High school statistics[link]

(*) – Non–varsity season

College[link]

Rose while playing at the University of Memphis.

Rose accepted a scholarship to play for the University of Memphis Tigers under John Calipari, who recruited him after seeing the high schooler play in an AAU game.^[34] Strong efforts were made by Indiana University and in-state University of Illinois to sign Rose to their own programs.^[35] Illinois in particular planned to pair Rose and their five-star recruit Eric Gordon, who had played AAU basketball with Rose, together.^[36] Gordon however retracted his verbal commitment from the Fighting Illini, opting to play for Indiana, and Rose subsequently gave his verbal commitment before the start of his senior season.^[37] Rose chose Memphis because of the school's history of putting players in the NBA and the prospect of Rod Strickland, a 17 year veteran of the league, mentoring him. Rose switched to #23, due to the fact that #25 had been retired by the school in honor of Penny Hardaway.^[38]

With the addition of Rose and led by veteran upperclassmen Joey Dorsey and Chris Douglas-Roberts, the Tigers started out the season ranked third in the nation. Memphis sprinted to a 26–0 start and claimed the number one ranking in the country for the first time in over 25 years before falling to the University of Tennessee Volunteers 66–62 in February.^[39] Memphis was able to bounce back and capture the Conference USA Tournament to qualify for the "Big Dance" with a 33–1 record.^[40] Rose averaged 14.9 points per game, 4.7 assists and 4.5 rebounds per game during the regular season and earned All-American Third Team honors among others.^[41] He finished as a finalist for the Bob Cousy Award as well as the John R. Wooden Award.^[42]

Memphis was seeded No. 1 in the South Region and blew out most of its competition on its way to the Final Four. Rose earned high praise for his increased focus on defense, hounding Texas Longhorn guard D.J. Augustin into a low-percentage game in the Elite Eight.^[43] In a match-up against the UCLA in the Final Four, Rose finished with 25 points and 9 rebounds while putting tight pressure on Bruins' point Darren Collison to lead the Tigers to the NCAA championship game against the University of Kansas Jayhawks with a 85–67 victory.^[44] The win set a NCAA mark for most wins in a season (38).^[45] Against Kansas, Rose scored 17 points on 7–17 shooting, grabbed six rebounds and dished seven assists, but missed a critical free throw at the end of the second half, and Memphis fell in overtime, 75–68.^[46] Memphis concluded the season 38–2. Rose was named to the All-Final Four team after averaging 20.8 points, 6.5 rebounds and 6 assists during the tourney.^[47]

On April 15, Rose declared for the 2008 NBA Draft.^[48]

Grading controversy[link]

According to the University of Memphis' legal counsel Sheri Lipman, a month after the loss to the Kansas Jayhawks, the NCAA sent a letter to the school stating that Rose had "an invalidated standardized test score the previous year at Chicago's Simeon High School". The next January, the NCAA sent another letter, charging Memphis with knowing that Rose had someone else take his SAT for him.^[49] Memphis started its own investigation and sent its response back on April 24.^[50]

On May 28, the Memphis Commercial Appeal obtained the letter through the Freedom of Information Act and released it. Although the player's name was redacted due to privacy laws, process of elimination and sources revealed the player as Derrick Rose. The next day in a separate investigation, James Sullivan, Inspector General of the Chicago Public Schools district's Board of Education, released a report of his investigation stating that four student-athletes of a CPS school had one-month grade boosts to alter their college transcripts.^[51] The Chicago Sun-Times revealed the school as Simeon Career Academy and that three of the four were Rose and his former teammates Kevin Johnson and Tim Flowers, prominent members of the back-to-back championship teams.^[51] The newspaper claimed that Rose's grade was changed from a D to a C.^[51] Another part of the report stated that "high school staff lost the original permanent records for three of the above mentioned students athletes" (including the unknown four).^[52] Sullivan started the investigation because "none of the grade changes were supported by any documentation”. He also failed to find a suspect as "at least seven people at Simeon had the ability to access student grades and records".^[51] Illinois High School Association (IHSA) executive director Marty Hickman reacted by saying, "It is obvious that this is worth taking a look into".^[52] Robert Smith, who coached the Wolverines from 2004 to 2007, denied any wrongdoing.^[51] District spokeswoman Monique Bond said the students involved probably didn't know about the grade change.

Additionally, allegations surfaced that Rose's brother, Reggie, had been allowed to travel with the team for free on several occasions.^[53]

Memphis contended that it had learned of the allegations about Rose's SAT score shortly after he enrolled at the school. It conducted its own investigation, in which Rose was questioned by four school officials. Ultimately, Memphis was unable to find any evidence that Rose had cheated based on what was available at the time, and cleared him to play.^[54]

Rose released a statement through his lawyer Daniel E. Reidy: "Mr. Rose is aware of the allegations reported in the press. Mr. Rose cooperated fully with the University of Memphis' athletic and legal departments’ investigation of this issue when he was a student, and that investigation uncovered no wrongdoing on his part."

On August 20, the NCAA vacated Memphis' 2007–08 season. It took the line that even though Rose's score hadn't been thrown out until after the season, strict liability required that he be declared ineligible.^[8] It also determined that even without the questions about his test score, Rose would have lost his eligibility in December 2007 due to Reggie being allowed to travel for free.^[55]

College statistics[link]

Note: college statistics are unofficial, as Rose's achievements have officially been stricken from Memphis's record books.

NBA career[link]

Chicago Bulls (2008–present)[link]

2008–09 season: Rookie of the Year[link]

Derrick Rose during his rookie season.

Rose was selected first overall in the draft by the Chicago Bulls,^[2] an unlikely event considering that Chicago had only a 1.7% chance of capturing the top pick in the draft lottery held that past May.^[56] He was selected to the U.S. Select Team to scrimmage against and prepare the National Team for the Olympics in Beijing.^[57][58][59] In mid-July, he played two games in the Orlando Pro Summer League until forced out by tendonitis in his right knee, ending his summer,^[60] but returned in October to play all eight preseason games.^[61]

Rose started his rookie year strong, becoming the first Bulls draftee to score 10 points or more in his first 10 games since Michael Jordan,^[62] and earned Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month honors for November and December.^[63][64] During the All-Star Weekend, Rose played in the Rookie Challenge,^[65] and won the Skills Challenge, where he beat out several All-Stars to become the first rookie to claim the trophy.^[66] Overcoming a January and February slump, Rose returned to form and won monthly rookie honors in March. Meanwhile, the Bulls, re-energized by the trade deadline acquisitions of John Salmons and Brad Miller, finished the regular season on a 12–4 spurt to qualify for the 7th seed in the Eastern Conference. Chicago's late push contributed to Rose's winning Rookie of the Year, joining Michael Jordan (1985) and Elton Brand (2000) as the only Bulls to do so.^[3] He was also the first number-one draft pick since LeBron James to win the award. He averaged 16.8 points on 47.5% field goal shooting, 6.3 assists (leading all rookies) and 3.9 rebounds per game and was also named to the NBA All-Rookie First Team.^[4]

In his playoff debut against the defending champion Boston Celtics, Rose recorded 36 points (tying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's NBA record for points scored by a rookie in his playoff debut set 1970), 11 assists, and 4 rebounds as the Bulls prevailed in a 105–103 overtime win on the road.^[67][68][69] Rose became the second player in NBA history to record 35 points and 10 assists in his playoff debut, after Chris Paul. Rose averaged 19.7 points on 47.5% shooting, 6.3 assists and 4.9 rebounds per game in his playoff debut, as the Bulls were defeated by the Celtics in 7 games.^[70]

2009–10 season: All Star bid[link]

Rose's sophomore season started off on a bad note when he injured his ankle in his first preseason game. Rose would go on to miss the rest of the preseason. Rose did start the Bulls season opener against the San Antonio Spurs but played limited minutes in a win. Rose's ankle bothered him for most of November, but as his ankle healed, his game improved greatly. On January 28, 2010, Derrick Rose was elected to his first career All Star Game as a reserve for the Eastern Conference, making him the first Bulls player to make the All-Star game since Michael Jordan in 1998.^[71] Rose had eight points, four assists and three steals in his first game as an All-Star. The Bulls once again made the playoffs in the 2009–10 season finishing with a 41–41 record. In the playoffs Rose averaged 26.8 points and 7.2 assists, but the Bulls still lost in five games to the Cleveland Cavaliers.^[72]

On April 13, 2010, Rose scored 39 points against the Celtics, making 15–22 field goals, and 9–10 free throws.

According to a January 2010 report by ESPN, Rose had the 4th best selling jersey in the league.^[73]

2010–11 season: MVP season[link]

Rose led the Bulls to 62 wins, and the best record overall during the 2010–11 NBA season.

On October 30, 2010, in the Bulls' second game of the season, Rose scored 39 points in a 101–91 win against the Detroit Pistons. Two days after, Rose contributed 13 assists, helping Luol Deng score his career high 40 points in a win against the Portland Trail Blazers.

On December 10, 2010, Rose scored 29 points and had 9 assists, leading the Bulls to their first victory over the Los Angeles Lakers since December 19, 2006.

On January 17, 2011, Derrick Rose finished with 22 points, 10 rebounds, and 12 assists recording his first career triple-double against the Memphis Grizzlies.

On January 27, 2011, Rose was announced as a starting guard on the 2011 NBA All-Star Team for the East squad.^[74]

On February 17, 2011, in the Bulls' last game before the All-Star break, Derrick Rose recorded a regular-season career high 42 points, along with 8 assists and 5 rebounds, as the Bulls beat the San Antonio Spurs 109–99.

On March 26, 2011, Rose had a career high 17 assists, along with 30 points, and 3 rebounds, in a 95–87 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks.

At the end of the 2010–11 NBA season the Bulls finished with a league leading record of 62–20.^[75] Their 60+ wins was the Bulls' first since the 1997–98 season and sixth 60+ win in franchise history.^[76]

At season's end, Rose became only the third player in the past thirty years of the NBA to record 2,000 points and 600 assists in a single season. The other two players were LeBron James and Michael Jordan.^[77]

On May 3, 2011, Rose, at the age of 22, was named the NBA Most Valuable Player, surpassing Wes Unseld as the youngest player in league history to receive the award (Unseld won the award during the 1968-69 NBA season at age 23). Rose joined Michael Jordan as the only players to receive the award in Chicago Bulls history.^[78]

In the 2011 NBA Playoffs, the Bulls defeated the Indiana Pacers and Atlanta Hawks in the first two rounds. In the Eastern Conference Finals, the Bulls faced the Miami Heat, led by their three All-Stars LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. The Bulls lost the series in five games. During the 2011 playoffs, Rose averaged 27.1 points per game, but only shot 39% from the field and 24% for three pointers.^[79]

2011–12 season: Injury-plagued season[link]

In December 2011, Rose signed a five-year contract extension with the Bulls for $94.8 million. The contract was 30 percent of the Bulls' salary cap, the maximum allowed under a rule dubbed the "Derrick Rose Rule" from the 2011 NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement.^[80]

Rose was voted as an All-Star Game starter for the second consecutive year. He was the second leading vote getter behind Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard.

During Game 1 of the first round of the playoffs against the Philadelphia 76ers, Rose injured his left knee while trying to jump. He was immediately helped off the court. The injury occurred in the fourth quarter with about a minute left in the game. An MRI later revealed that Rose tore the ACL in his left knee and would miss the rest of the season.^[81] Head coach Tom Thibodeau was criticized for keeping Rose late in the game when the Bulls were leading by 12 points.^[82]

Player profile[link]

Standing at 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m), Rose is a point guard. Rose has established himself as an elite athlete who is extremely strong and fast.^[83] He constantly attacks the basket and finishes in traffic which contributes to his career average of 21 points per game.^[84] Rose is known for is ability to convert difficult layups. Rose's excellent body control and the ability to change direction extremely well contribute to his ability to get to the rim.^[85] Rose is at his best in the full court set because of his athleticism. He can initiate the pick and roll at an elite level, contributing to his career average of 6.8 assists per game.^[86] Throughout his first two seasons the main weakness cited in Rose's ability was his three point range; he averaged only .242 on three point field goals throughout his first two seasons.^[87][88] Rose greatly improved his three point range in his third season (his MVP season). He averaged .332 on three point field goals and made 128 three pointers in that season alone. During the off-season, during which he worked on his three point shot, Rose said, "It's there; I have a consistent 3-point shot now." He added in another interview, "You'll see. I just have so much confidence in my jump shot now. It's coming along so good. It's past even my expectations at this point." ^[89]

NBA statistics[link]

Regular season[link]

Playoffs[link]

Career highs[link]

Regular season[link]

Playoffs[link]

Triple-double[link]

Recorded 22 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds (in 40 minutes) at Memphis Grizzlies on 02011-01-17January 17, 2011.^[90]

Accomplishments and awards[link]

NBA[link]

• NBA Most Valuable Player: 2011^[78]
• NBA Rookie of the Year: 2009^[3]
• All-NBA First Team: 2011^[91]
• NBA All-Star Selection: 2010,^[92] 2011,^[74] 2012^[93]
• Skills Challenge Champion: 2009
• NBA All-Rookie First Team: 2009^[4]
• Conference Rookie of the Month: November, December, March

• Conference Player of the Week Selections

• Conference Player of the Month Selection

• Invited and agreed to play for the United States men's national basketball team in the 2010 FIBA World Championship.
  • Awarded "Player of the Game" Trophy after an exhibition against Greece.
• Nominated for "Best Breakthrough Athlete" at the ESPY Awards 2009
• Youngest player in NBA history to win Most Valuable Player (&1000000000000002200000022 years, &10000000000000211000000211 days)

College[link]

• Freshman year (2007–2008)
  • NCAA Tournament All-Final Four Team^[47]
  • NCAA Tournament South Region MVP^[94]
  • NABC 3rd Team All-American^[41]
  • NABC All-District 7 First Team
  • All-Conference USA First Team^[95]
  • Conference USA Freshman of the Year^[95]
  • Conference USA All Freshman Team 1st Team^[95]
  • Sporting News All-Freshman Team^[96]
  • Conference USA Player of the Week for games between December 17 through the 23rd^[97]
  • 2K Sports College Hoops Classic MVP^[98]
  • 2K Sports College Hoops Classic All-Tournament Team

High school[link]

• Senior year (2006–2007)
  • Class AA State Championship
  • Class AA Tournament MVP
  • Illinois Mr. Basketball 2007^[29]
  • 2007 McDonald's All-American^[30]
  • USA Today 2007 All-USA First Team^[99]
  • Parade 2007 All-America First Team^[31]
  • EA Sports 2007 All-American First Team^[100]
  • All State Illinois 2007^[101]
  • MaxPreps.com All-America First Team
  • Slam Magazine 2007 First Team
  • MidStateHoops.com 2007 Class AA Player of the Year^[102]
• Junior year (2005–2006)
  • Class AA State Championship
  • Class AA Tournament MVP
  • Parade 2006 All-American Fourth Team^[17]
  • All State Illinois 2006
  • EA Sports 2006 All-American Second Team^[16]
• Sophomore year (2004–2005)
  • Parade 2005 All-American Third Team^[14]
  • Chicago Sun-Times All-Area^[103]

Off the court[link]

Endorsements[link]

After being drafted by the Bulls in 2008, Rose signed a shoe deal with Adidas for $1 million per year.^[104][105] He has also signed with Wilson Sporting Goods.^[106] Other endorsement deals include Skullcandy headphones, Powerade, Force Factor sports drinks and a suburban Chicago Nissan dealership.^[107] His agent is former Bulls guard B. J. Armstrong.

Rose was announced as the cover athlete for the 2K Sports Downloadable Content game, NBA 2K10 Draft Combine, which was released on Xbox Live Arcade for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation Network for the PlayStation 3.^[108]

In 2011, Rose was estimated by Crain's Chicago Business to earn $1.5–$2.5 million annually in endorsements, ranking just outside the top 10 NBA players in that category.^[109] In December 2011, it was reported that Rose was nearing a contract extension with Adidas, worth $250 million over 10 years.^[110]

Salaries[link]

See also[link]

• 2006 high school boys basketball All-Americans

Notes[link]