Fortunately, the floppy disk already had been standardized in form factor and magnetic characteristics, so from 3.5" up to 8" floppies the medium could be used in each floppy drive, provided that the form factor of medium and drive was the same. Paper tapes and cards had their best times already behind them, and the mini tape cartridge was an indeed low cost alternative for local mass storage, but not really designed for interoperability with other systems. to load operating systems during system boot. In the era of the HP 9845, the floppy disk already was the most important medium for data interchange on desktop level, and some smaller computer systems even used floppy disks as standard mass storage, e.g. One important objective of standards is to ensure interoperability, and interoperability between computer systems generally means using the same media, the same information structure, and the same semantics. In fact, most vintage systems defined their own standards, so the early days of computing were determined by a much higher degree of heterogenity, than it is today. And even in the early years of the PC, by far not every system immediately adapted to the IBM standards. It is hard to imagine, but there was a time before the IBM PC.
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