(Excerpts from a message dated 11-29-99, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard to
Murray Lesser)

Hi Jonathan--

 ML> I don't really remember when extended partitions were added to
 ML> MS/PC-DOS, perhaps because I skipped the 80286 generation, moving
 ML> from a PC/XT to an 80386-powered PS/2 model 80.  But, IIRC, there
 ML> weren't any hard drives for desktop machines having more than 32 MB
 ML> capacity before the PS/2 came along.

JP>I, in my turn, (perhaps because I have never used one) don't remember
  >offhand when the PS/2 came along, but I do happen to know that the
  >whole idea of an "extended partition" was new to MS-DOS version
  >3.3.  MS-DOS 3.2 and earlier didn't know about "primary" partitions. 
  >It just had "partitions", and there could be a maximum of four of
  >them.  If they were formatted as FAT, they could be a maximum of
  >32MeB in size, meaning that the largest possible "all FAT" hard disc
  >size was approximately 128MeB .

    "Possible" from an addressing standpoint doesn't necessarily mean
"exists."  According to Deitel and Kogan (The Design of OS/2), DOS 3.3
was introduced in 1987 to support the PS/2 80386/80387 real mode and the
3.5" 1.44 MB diskette.  I bought my PS/2 model 80 (the only model in the
original PS/2 release with an 80386) in early 1988 (the machine died in
late 1999).  IIRC, the maximum available hard-drive capacity at the time
of that first release was two 70 MB ESDI drives.

JP>I find it hard to believe that you, who only three messages back in
  >this echo was praising the small size of a few-hundred-odd byte 
  >program written by David Noon, and who always makes such a fuss
  >about the couple of MeB consumed by the system structures on an HPFS
  >volume, would discount as trivial a *whole* *8* *MeB*.  (-:

    You should have noticed that I was making a facetious reply to a
facetious request for the "smallest" useful program.  You might also
have remembered that (on a different occasion) I was comparing the 3% (3
MB) lost to HPFS on a 100 MB Zip diskette (as compared to the same
diskette formatted FAT) with only two backup files on it, which is only
one of the reasons I wasn't unhappy that a FixPak-induced bug prevented
me from formatting my Zip diskettes HPFS.  "Backup" usage is one of the
few cases where one should should even consider operating with a "full"
disk drive (another is when the partition is very rarely, if ever,
written to).

    Available-space discussions make sense only when one remembers that
they are purely relative.  You really ought to understand that 8 MB is
only 0.1% of an 8 GB drive (0.2% of a 4 GB drive, in case arithmetic is
difficult for you), so is in the noise as far as usable space on such
drives is concerned.  One tenth of one percent isn't worth worrying
about, let alone making a serious(?) suggestion that legacy drive usage
be modified to "save" any part of it.

    It was Euripides (fifth century, BCE) who wrote "The gods visit the
sins of the fathers upon the children."  You will just have to learn to
live, patiently, with those early architectural sins!  Of course, I
suppose you could move to another platform and start over with another
set of guesses about what the future may bring.  Or become a monopoly so
you can ignore your legacy customers :-).

    Regards,

        --Murray

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 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * Nothing is so uncommon as common sense

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