8" floppies were used on the IBM Displaywriter which I was selling then. The floppies were also used on the IBM System32.Those were the days when I sold inkjet printers for £6000 and my Cortina Estate cost me £1500!
Ooops sorry for thread creep.
I should also add that the original IBM PC that was launched in the UK in 1983 came with 1 or 2 5.25 floppies. The XT launched later in 1983 had one 5.25 floppy and a ginormous 10Mb hard disk. The 3.5 floppy did not arrive until later. Much of the history of drive letters stems from some early program writers who hard coded drive letters in their programs.
I came across one such program in the early 90s when the program was written( by a major firm of accountants) to read program modules fronm Drive C and write data to drive D. One manufacturer changed their models from two smaller hard drives to one larger one. Net result the program would not run, the programmer had long since disappeared, one unworkable system until the manufacturer supplied the second hard drive.
One amusing aside of the early PC days was IBM PC Dos - it arrived on a floppy and if you used the type command to display a file, one of the DOS modules came up with "Microsoft Rules - OK?" on the screen.
Last edited by srobarts; 23rd Mar 2012 at 21:53.
Reason: Adding info