Sender: eric@ruckus.brouhaha.com From: Eric Smith Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: 8-inch floppy capacity (was Re: Smallest Storage Capacity Hard Disk?) References: <9srltf$fku$1@newsreaderg1.core.theplanet.net> Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs X-Eric-Conspiracy: There is no conspiracy. Date: 14 Nov 2001 10:44:05 -0800 Message-ID: Lines: 27 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: ruckus.brouhaha.com X-Trace: 14 Nov 2001 10:44:44 -0800, ruckus.brouhaha.com Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.kjsl.com!news.spies.com!ruckus.brouhaha.com Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:94370 "Paul Grayson" writes: > Having never really used an 8" floppy in anger I've forgotten how much they > held, but I assume it was close to the 160KB of a single-sided 5 1/4" > floppy. The most common soft-sectored 8-inch floppy formats were: sect bytes per total chan. per total sides tracks track sect code sect bytes ----- ------ ----- ----- ----- ----- ------- SSSD 1 77 26 2002 FM 128 256256 SSDD 1 77 26 2002 MFM 256 512512 DSDD 2 77 26 4004 MFM 256 1025024 There were also less common variants like DSSD, and larger sector sizes (mostly on DD disks) such as 512 and 1024 bytes. There were some oddball formats like M2FM on Intel development systems, and modified MFM data with FM marks on DEC RX02s. These had the same capacity as standard SSDD format but were not interchangeable. And there were *really* oddball formats like the Ohio Scientific stuff, which used a UART as a disk controller. That's right, every byte on the disk had start and stop bits! ###### Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers From: William Robison Subject: Re: 8-inch floppy capacity (was Re: Smallest Storage Capacity Hard Disk?) X-Nntp-Posting-Host: flip.physics.uiowa.edu Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Message-ID: <3BF2FA69.19570593@uiowa.edu.com> Sender: news@sysadm.physics.uiowa.edu (News Administrator) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Organization: University of Iowa X-Accept-Language: en References: <9srltf$fku$1@newsreaderg1.core.theplanet.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 23:12:41 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.78 [en] (Win98; U) Lines: 34 Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!newscore.univie.ac.at!194.25.134.126.MISMATCH!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!nntp-relay.ihug.net!ihug.co.nz!logbridge.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.physics.uiowa.edu!news Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:94406 Goran Larsson wrote: > > In article , > Eric Smith wrote: > > > There were also less common variants like DSSD, and larger sector sizes > > (mostly on DD disks) such as 512 and 1024 bytes. > > Some disks were DSDD but had the first one or two tracks in single > density. This was done so they could be used to boot systems without > support for double density in the boot proms. > > -- > Göran Larsson hoh AT approve DOT se Heh,(chuckle) that brings back memories... DSDD format with 2740 format on track 0, 1K sectors on track 1 with 2-76 being any format that was convenient for the job at hand... Usually 1K sectors as that was all the memory available on the controller for the sector buffer... ot the single sided format with track 1 setup with four 4K sectors (that controller didn't have a sector buffer and wasn't limited)... But for really big cabinets, why hasn't anyone mentioned Fastrand or FH423... -Willy ###### Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers From: hoh@invalid.invalid (Goran Larsson) Subject: Re: 8-inch floppy capacity (was Re: Smallest Storage Capacity Hard Disk?) Message-ID: Organization: [1] + 5934 done /bin/rm -rf ~/ & X-No-Archive: yes X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test73 (May 24, 2000) References: <9srltf$fku$1@newsreaderg1.core.theplanet.net> Lines: 12 NNTP-Posting-Host: 212.151.131.115 X-Complaints-To: news-abuse@swip.net X-Trace: nntpserver.swip.net 1005771660 212.151.131.115 (Wed, 14 Nov 2001 22:01:00 MET DST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 22:01:00 MET DST X-Sender: q-11932@d212-151-131-115.swipnet.se Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 20:50:25 GMT Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!newscore.univie.ac.at!howland.erols.net!newsfeed1.swip.net!swipnet!nntpserver.swip.net!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.folklore.computers:94454 In article , Eric Smith wrote: > There were also less common variants like DSSD, and larger sector sizes > (mostly on DD disks) such as 512 and 1024 bytes. Some disks were DSDD but had the first one or two tracks in single density. This was done so they could be used to boot systems without support for double density in the boot proms. -- Göran Larsson hoh AT approve DOT se