3.5inch Floppy Disk.

First introduced in 1982/1983 the 1.44MByte 3.5" floppy disk was a success, by 1996
there were an estimated 5 billion 1.44MByte floppy disks when the World population was 6 Billion.

Although successful, there were some unhappy outcomes. A student at a university might work at home
on a piece of course work, or a post-graduate on a dissertation, and save it to a floppy disk,
only to take it to the university to find it cannot be read. They had not saved it to the hard disk either.
Floppy disks were dodgy, especially when used as beer mats, as they were.

This is the ubiquitous "3.5inch 1.44MByte" floppy disk.
The number made probably exceeds all other floppy disks combined.
This one is a "BOOT DISK", you could insert it in the floppy drive and power your PC on,
and it would load the Operating System, in this case "WINDOWS 95", from the floppy disk
rather than the hard disk. The normal boot sequence was tried from the 1.44MByte floppy,
then the CD/ROM drive, and finally from the hard disk, which it normally booted from.
If the boot failed from the hard disk this sequence of attempts to boot
provided the launch of a lifeboat in the "3.5inch WINDOWS 95 STARTUP DISK".

There is only one opening in the front of the enclosure guarded by a spring loaded flap.
Here it is held open for you to see, it allowed the read/write head access to the disk.

In the rear view I note a hole top right meaning it is double density,
but no hole top left, meaning it is READ ONLY.