Murray Lesser wrote to Jonathan de Boyne Pollar on 12-01-1999

ML>     Available-space discussions make sense only when one remembers
ML> that they are purely relative.  You really ought to understand that
ML> 8 MB is only 0.1% of an 8 GB drive (0.2% of a 4 GB drive, in case
ML> arithmetic is difficult for you), so is in the noise as far as
ML> usable space on such drives is concerned.  One tenth of one percent
ML> isn't worth worrying about, let alone making a serious(?) suggestion
ML> that legacy drive usage be modified to "save" any part of it.
ML> 
ML>     It was Euripides (fifth century, BCE) who wrote "The gods visit the
ML> sins of the fathers upon the children."  You will just have to
ML> learn to live, patiently, with those early architectural sins!  Of
ML> course, I suppose you could move to another platform and start over
ML> with another set of guesses about what the future may bring.  Or
ML> become a monopoly so you can ignore your legacy customers :-).

I'm surprised that no one has thought to mention the IBM 'policy' of
truncating the disk allocation such that the last cylinder was also not
available until a few fixpaks back.  I don't recall the exact details,
but it was along the lines of forcing the last partition to end no
futher than the last head, last sector of the last full cylinder on the
disk.  If the last partition ended exactly st the end of the disk, a
full cylinder was reserved.  I think that there was also a minimum
reserved space required based on disk size.  While this was fixed about
the time the first >4.1 gig version of IBM1S506.ADD (it applied to SCSI
as well) there was considerable discussion with Sam Detweiler on the
news groups at the time since he was writing the drivers.

Will Honea 
--- Maximus/2 2.02