In 1969 the first floppy disks were introduced. It was a read-only 8-inch disk that could store 80kB of data. Four years later, in 1973, a similar floppy disk with the same size could store 256kB of data, and it was rewritable. Since then the trend has been the same, smaller floppy disks and higher data capacity. In the late 1990s you could easily store 250 MB of data on а 3-inch disk.
Floppy disks were considered as revolutionary media for transporting data from one computer to another. They could not store as much data as hard disks, but, being much cheaper and more flexible, they became very widespread. Since 1973 after 8-inch – disks became common and were being used to move smaller amounts of data and floppy disks began to be widely used for data backup purposes.