On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 at 06:40, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> And, in the 3.5" form factor, it was fairly straightforward to tweak the
> parameters of the format to get 1.7M on a 1.4M disk.
I did that on occasion. So did some OS distributions, just to keep the
number of boot diskettes down to just 3 and still be able to boot a
bloated 1990s OS off floppy, plus enough drivers and storage subsystem
to access a CD drive.
I always thought the WinNT installer bootstrap process was a clever
way to get around this. Boot into DOS, run WINNT.EXE and you're off.
It was much easier to get a CD working under DOS than under, say, OS/2
(swearing at the painful memories) or Linux in the early kernel-1.0
days.
I tried to explain this to an OS/2 evangelist friend of mine. He
thought I was deranged. Still, I think it would have done OS/2 a lot
of good.
> Note: to call it "1.44MB" requires creative redefining a MB to be 1024000
> bytes (10^3 * 2^10).
Once I learned this, I switched to calling them 1.4 MB floppies. This
has an added bonus: as well as feeling smugly pedantic, I infrequently
but regularly got to correct people trying to out-pedanticize me.
> There was a Barium-ferrite vertical recording 3.5" ("ED") with 2.8M
> capacity seen occasionally on IBM PS/2. ("2.88M" in marketing megabytes,
> or 4MB unformatted capacity (which is what NeXt chose to call it))
I wish they'd caught on, if only as a bridge to...
> The "floptical" was 20MB. Admittedly a change in technology, but the
> floptical drive could also read/write 1.4M disks.
> It was usually connected SCSI, not SA400.
I mostly saw IDE (well, ATAPI, I suspect) ones.
But they didn't stop at 20MB, of course... there were Sony HiFD and
SuperDisks. 100 MB, 120, 150, 200, 240. If the floppy diskette
industry had just kept it together, it could have kept the rewritable
CD-ROM at bay for another decade or more.
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49563.html
> There were a variety of 2.5", 2.9" drives. Some were smaller images of
> 720K, but there was at least one with a single spiral track.
TBH I never saw much point in the (even) smaller ones.
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