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Re: Will IBM 360 Floppies work in Apple ][ Drives?

Linards Ticmanis wrote:

David Empson wrote:



I used the standard IBM 8" SSSD floppy disks on a CP/M system in the mid
80s. If memory serves, it had 40 tracks, 32 sectors per track, 128 bytes
per sector, which would be 160 KB.



I seem to remember that it was 77 tracks of 26 sectors (or some other
fairly odd numbers). Never had one, but CP/M has some built in tables
for these. That's were those ugly 128 byte records come from that almost
everybody else had to block/deblock in their BIOS, wasting precious space.

Just looked into wikipedia: it was really 77x26x128. Equivalent to 2002
punch cards (2000 was a common box size for those, it seems).


Although they made smaller boxes for bookstores, etc., the 2000-card
box was the standard.  I remember *walls* of stacked 200-card boxes!

I used to carry one around with me a lot.  ;-)

There were also "file cabinets" for punched cards that had drawers
holding 4000 cards, plus just enough wiggle room for a sliding
"backstop" to keep them in compression.

-michael

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Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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