Forgotten Voice

My first project at Hursley was the IBM 370/135 - late sixties, early seventies. It used the first floppy disk, known as 'Igar', as read-only storage to load the microcode into the system. I used to wonder why this device had such an unusual name, so asked one of the more senior engineers on the project, (Clive Williams I think).

I was told the the floppy had been envisaged as part of a much more significant product line. The Product Planners of the day however, couldn't see that a slow, relatively low capacity, portable, storage medium would have any significant market, so cut the project's funding.

In a fit of pique the Programme Manager removed the first and last letters from the original project's name, hence Figaro became Igar.