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

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 25 Jul 2000 12:24:07 +0200, pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)
wrote:

>On the PC there were utlities to read and write various CP/M disk
>formats.  Some of the better of those utilities could read a few
>hundred different CP/M disk formats.  One common CP/M format was
>always missing among all these utilities though: the Apple CP/M disk
>format.  This was because of the weird low-level disk format which
>was used by Apple but nobody else and which was impossible to read on
>a non-Apple system (unless you added custm hardware just for reading
>those disks).  Yes, this disk format made sense at an early stage,
>because floppy disk controller cards became simpler and cheaper, and
>there was no standardization anyway back then.  But as time passed
>on, non-standard formats became more awkward.  That's why the Mac
>changed from the GCR to the MFM low-level disk format: because it was
>used by everyone else and enabled file transfer to/from alien disk
>formats with only a software add-on.

As far as I know, the Mac never used the 720k double-density MFM
format for its native use.  They supported it only to be able to read
and write PC disks.  Macs continued to use 800k double-density GCR
format disks for native use.

They did, however, adopt the 1.44M high-density MFM format for native
use for compatibility reasons.

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