Re: GCR <--CP/M --> MS-DOS and vice versa?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <ozmdnZg_la3ScvWjXTWcoQ@comcast.com>,
Bill Garber <willy46pa@comcast.net> wrote:
 
> What?!, DVD and CD use spiral? What about the 650 mb floppy
> you can make on a CD writer with CD/RW disks? Are they also
> spiral? I think not.
 
They are spiral too...
 
Remember that CD's originated as a medium for recording music, and
choosing a spiral track was therefore quite natural.
 
Several years later, CD-ROM's appeared, and then were designed to be
hardware compatible to music CD's --- the only difference was the way
the digital data was encoded (most significantly an extra layer of
error detection and correction was added -- on music CD's, if a
"sector" is corrupt your CD player just repeats the previous sector
and your ears won't notice the difference since there are 75 sectors
of 2 KBytes each per second.  But this method is of course
unacceptable for digital computer data).
 
A number of years later still, when CD-R/RW's appeared, they too
were designed to be as compatible as possible with CD-ROM's and
thus also with music CD's, on the hardware level.  And that's the
reason why you can create music CD's on your computer and then play
them on regular music CD players.
 
-- 
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