Re: PC or Mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20020204000008.01444.00000744@mb-dh.aol.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
 
> Greg Weston wrote:
> 
>>In article <a3em9h$3pa$1@merope.saaf.se>, Paul Schlyter
>><pausch@saaf.se> wrote:
>><snip>
>>>>>> Apple never really switched over to PC format floppies.
>>>>>  
>>>>> Then how come I can read, on PC's, the floppies created on my wife's
>>>>> Mac?
>>>> 
>>>> The Mac will happily write to FAT disks with essentially no warning to
>>>> the user.
>>>  
>>> She used floppies I once bought her - since I wasn't aware then that
>>> the Mac can read/write PC formatted floppies, I was careful getting
>>> floppies which were "preformatted for the Mac" (whatever that may
>>> mean...)
>>
>> That would mean they were formatted with and HFS directory structure
>> (as opposed to a FAT structure). I don't know your exact
>> circumstances.  If you can read on an x86 box floppies that she's
>> writing from her Mac, she's writing to FAT floppies. Convenient for
>> file transfer, but if you don't need it it's unnecessarily slow for
>> her.
 
Speed isn't an issue here since these floppies are used only from
time to time.  But it's obviously FAT floppies, and she never did
anything particular to select floppy format.
 
 
> Mac 1.44MB floppies are written with MFM encoding and HFS or
> FAT formatting.  "Native" Mac HD floppies are HFS formatting.
> 
> A PC can read any MFM-encoded disk, as long as it has software
> to make sense of the format--in this case HFS.  A number of companies
> make such add-on software for windows.  There are even freeware
> versions that can read Mac MFM diskettes on a PC.
> 
> What a PC _cannot_ do is read or write a GCR-encoded diskette,
> but on the Mac these were only 400K (pretty old) or 800K diskettes.
 
Well, if the right hardware is added, even a PC can read GCR-encoded
diskettes.  Check out:
 
    http://members.tripod.com/~apd2/catweasl.htm
    http://www.tim-mann.org/trs80resources.html
 
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