Re: Apple II-Or Come on people, It's a 20 year old computer

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3989FF26.852059A2@dcnet2000.com>,
Phoenyx  <quazar@dcnet2000.com> wrote:
 
>> However, what once made very good sense won't automatically make
>> good sense forever.  Today MFM disk controller chips are cheap, and
>> MFM disks can store just about as much as GCR disks.  So there's no
>> longer any advantage in using GCR instead of MFM for floppy
>> storage, but there is a disadvantage: the low-level
>> incompatibility.
> 
> Actually they could hold more, it depends on the formatting routine.
> There is software in Linux for this and years ago there was set of
> utilities for the PC.
 
Doesn't Linux usually run on PC's?  :-)))))
 
> It required a driver to bypass the BIOS limitations though. IIRC, it
> managed 800k from the DD, 1.4 meg from the 5.25 HD and 2 meg for
> 3.5 HD among others.
 
I have many old DD floppies, formatted to 800K.  The "BIOS
limitations" you refer to here were present only in some BIOS'es -- I
never had to use those drivers to read/write 800K DD floppies: some
BIOS'es assumed that a DD diskette always was a 40-track diskette,
and therefore refused to read 800K DD diskettes which were 80-track.
 
Formatting these diskettes to 800K, 1.4M and 2M required special format
programs of course.  However both IBM and Microsoft did distribute
some software on 2M 3.5" floppies, which could be read without
special drivers on the target PC.
 
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