Disking Banana

Go Bananas

From the September 1986 issue of The Micro User magazine

When I originally saw this ad, I thought it was some goofy one-off with no information. I was wrong.

In the 1980s, MD Roger Smith ran out of floppies to store files at his PR business. He realized that the average person wouldn’t know where to purchase more floppies, so he decided to start selling them. He met with representatives from the top three floppy makers (Verbatim, Maxell, and Memorex) and ordered thousands of 5.25 and 8 inch floppies. He wanted to become the king of disks, so the name Disking made sense. Smith hired a design agency to create an ad offering floppies by mail with next-day delivery and sent it off to Practical Computing magazine.

Where did the Banana name come from? Smith bet his suppliers that he would be able to market and sell floppies with that name. And, he did. The company created a wide range of banana-themed items to promote their new line of floppies. This included “inflatable bananas, badges, carrier bags, lorries”.

Another thing that made the Banana floppies stand out is that you could use both sides. “And Banana diskettes offered something new. Guess what? You could use both sides of the disc on a single side disc drive. You just took the disk out and turned it over. So you could get 200 kilobytes of data on one disc. Clever stuff!”

Disking exists to this day. From their website, they are a local computer parts and repair shop with six locations in the UK. I was unable to view their history due to an issue with WordPress. Anyone from the UK ever visit Disking?

Have you ever used Disking Banana floppies? Do you know anything about its history? Tell us about it in the comments below.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.