ANNOUNCE: World's First 3.5-inch Flexible Disk Drive Write-up

["Bryan Villados" <news002@macgeek.org>]

http://www.macgeek.org/museum/sony400kdrive/index.html

Though it's not directly related  to the Apple II's, it's part of Apple
history...

SONY Micro Floppydisk Drive - Model OA-D30V

The SONY Micro Floppypdisk Drive is very important to the history of Apple
Computer. SONY Corporation invented the "micro" floppy disk drive, releasing
its first commercially available model called the OA-D30V in 1981. The model
OA-D30V you see in these photos is therefore considered the world's first
flexible 400KB micro floppy disk drive to hit the market. In 1984, Apple
took a more modernized model, the model OA-D34V (and later the OA-D34V-02)
of the SONY mechanism and implemented it into the Apple Macintosh 128K. And,
around the same time, Apple included the same part into the Apple Lisa 2 and
the Apple Lisa 1 upgrade kit.

Read more about it, with detailed photos, via the link mentioned above.

--- Bryan