Michael J. Mahon wrote: (snip)
The formatting routines of the Apple II are software-adaptive to the speed of rotation of the particular drive, and manage to use the whole track quite nicely at the cost of just a few bytes of code.
They adapt to the speed? I believe you always need a gap, at least for write splice. (The time it takes to turn on the write signal after you detect the appropriate place. You also need a gap after for enough time to turn off the write signal. That gap also gives you tolerance for speed variations between formatting and writing. Some disks use a servo track so it can follow speed variationswhile writing. There are hard disks with a whole surface and head dedicated to the servo.
-- glen -- glen