In article , Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> My first home computer was an 8080 CP/M box with 8-inch floppies.
> I refused to go to 5 1/4-inch floppies because they had no
> standard format, making it a pain in the ass to change data with
> other users.

8" disks weren't that much better -- but at least there was the IBM
3740 format to fall back on for compatibility. In my first ever job
(not quite as long ago as yours) we had a Z80 CP/M machine with two
internal 5.15" floppies and an external 8" drive. That 8" drive
supported a DS/DD format with a massive 1.3MB capacity.

That machine was lovely to develop on as it had one of the nicest
keyboards to type on that I've ever encountered ... but it's main
purpose was as a disk format conversion box -- it could handle dozens
of formats on both the 5.25" and the 8" drives.

> (This was before the IBM Personal Computer imposed its own standard.)

By the time the IBM PC appeared most CP/M-80 machines I was seeing
wrote either 10 512-byte or 5 1024-byte sectors on a track on a 5.25"
floppy -- making 400kB of data in all. The mostly used WD controller
chips that allowed that. The floppy controller in the PC writes too
much lead data on each track to achieve that, so the best it can do is
9 sectors of 512 bytes -- giving 360k (DOS originally wrote only 8
sectors to keep the addressing simple(r), giving 320k in all).

IBM really screwed up there!

--
Cheers,
 Daniel.

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