Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

in the 8" days, the standard format was IBM 3740, which, literally was just
73 tracks (with four spares), 128 byte sectors, 26 sectors per track.
The 3741/3742 keying stations would read and write the sectors directly, as
if they were just a stack of punched cards.

-Thom

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 2:38 PM Rhialto <rhialto@falu.nl> wrote:

> On Sat 05 Jan 2019 at 02:23:59 +0000, smf wrote:
> > Some people claim the labels just described how they were formatted, as
> if
> > people didn't know how to format them when they opened the box.
> >
> > With the plethora of different systems available that would have required
> > formatting anyway, then it seems a largely pointless exercise if it's
> true.
>
> I don't think I have seen pre-formatted floppies until after the
> introduction of 90mm (3 1/2 thumbs) floppies. Probably not even in their
> first years. They were always MS-DOS formatted. I always presumed that
> that was because the IBM PC compatibles had become popular even amongst
> people who didn't even know how to format a floppy. (If 90 mm disks had
> been formatted from the beginning, it probably would have been Apple
> Macintosh format)
>
> (I suppose that earlier, mainframe and mini vendors like IBM and Digital
> Equipment Corporation might have sold pre-formatted floppies at a
> premium, possibly because they made it difficult for the user to format
> them themselves. Or maybe they only did that with hard disks.)
>
> -Olaf.
> --
> ___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert  -- "What good is a Ring of Power
> \X/ rhialto/at/falu.nl      -- if you're unable...to Speak." - Agent
> Elrond
>