FDD speed and capacity

["Allen Bong" <sfbong@tm.net.my>]

Something had bugged me for a long time about what are the factors that
control the speed of transferring a file to a FDD and the capacity of the
floppy disk drive in DOS, ProDos and GS/OS.

If Apple II was designed with a faster cpu, would it end up with a DOS
system that transfers a large file to the FDD faster or a disk with a higher
capacity?  As the file was written to FDD using the RWTS subroutine which
uses software timing, does it determine the transfer rate?  What did
Pronto-DOS and Derversi DOS do to make the transfer faster?

Which has the faster transfer speed ?   An Apple IIgs (2.8MHz) with 3.5"
800K using GCR format disk or a 720K DSDD using MFM format running on a PIII
1GHz windoz machine?

If the 6502B was selling at $10 in 1976, Would Woz come out with a DOS that
runs faster or a bigger capacity disk drive?

Allen.