New Commodore 64 is Finally Here--For Real! PC MAG Snip

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 1 Jan 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> I've seen this on digicams with CF cards.  2GB is the "official" limit to 
> FAT16 filesystems.  However, XP and later can format 4GB cards to FAT16 as 
> well--and it seems to work very well with my older cameras, which do not 
> understand FAT32.

While, at the time, 2G seemed "infinite", even then, I was amused at the 
2G limitation being due to the use of a SIGNED 32 bit number.  The size 
can be anywhere from -2147483648 to 2147483647.
By switching to an UNSIGNED 32, NT and the like made the limit 4G.

I had a few hard drives that were getting crowded, so I stomped on 
DIRectory entries on some floppies and made some files with negative file 
sizes.  I confirmed empirically that copying a file with a negative size 
to the drive did NOT increase free space.