For years, floppy disks were our primary storage medium. Slow, unreliable and with limited capacity, they were in practice more of a nuisance than an advantage. Still, many companies tried to improve the floppy, or simply adapt it to their needs. One of them was Fujifilm, which at some point in 1989 joined forces with Panasonic to market the LT-1, a two-inch diskette with a little over 700 KB of capacity. The LT-1 format was available for a single computer… and disappeared in record time.
During the 1980s, 3.5-inch floppy disks became a de facto standard in the industry. The 1.44 MB units debuted in 1986, and from then on, most manufacturers never looked back. However, these diskettes collided with the desire to build smaller portable computers. Some brands essentially offered external drives as accessories, while others decided to bet on miniaturization.
That brings us to late 1989. Zenith launched the Minisport, an extremely lightweight super-portable with an LCD screen and DOS 3.3 preinstalled on a ROM chip. But that is not the most interesting part: it decided to adopt the LT-1 mini diskette format created by Fujifilm. With an effective size of two inches, LT-1 seemed like the ideal companion for such a compact system…
Fujifilm LT-1: A failure in two inches
Colin from the channel This Does Not Compute explains that Fujifilm produced the LT-1 disks and Panasonic manufactured the readers. He also mentions that each diskette had a maximum capacity of 720 kilobytes, but the Museum of Obsolete Media reports a ceiling of 793 kilobytes. Either way, that was half of what users could already store on 3.5-inch floppies, so LT-1 was a technical regression from the start.
As if that were not enough, LT-1 floppies cost a fortune: $10 each, almost $24 adjusted for inflation. The problem was that Fujifilm could not subsidize the cost by selling drives, because that process was in Panasonic's hands. Unfortunately, the original Minisport did not sell many units, and Zenith soon discovered that LT-1 had become a problem. The company began offering external readers for traditional floppies, and for the second version of the Minisport, it eliminated the LT-1 drive completely.
Source: Museum of Obsolete Media
