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Comment by richardhod | Hacker News Reader

Also a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area and actually floppy were about 512k or so.

I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us

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For PC I remember the 5.25" were 1.2MB. Not actually bad capacity comparatively. Or 612KB for single sided.

Though Wikipedia lists quite wide range of sizes none at 512KB.

Actually 5.25" were usually 360 KB, the 1.2MB came later, just like 3.5" floppies, they were originally 360 Kb, then 720KB, only later they became 1.44MB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performance...

Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for their capacity (which was initially inferior).

For all the complaining I do about USB's naming standards—"Full Speed" is not in fact "full", it's slower than "High Speed"—I don't remember having the same gripes about Double Density vs. High Density :)

You skipped the time where there were punchers to open a second hole in 3.5 DD to make them HD (those were the times .... ;)):

https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-...

I seem to recall that there was a dedicated word-processor machine by someone from the original Macintosh team that formatted 3.5" disks for 512K.

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