28 Mar
2023
28 Mar
'23
6:06 p.m.
> "1.4M" disks (1,474,560 bytes of data /
1.474 SI Megabytes / 1.40625
> Mebibytes) are often called "1.44M", because that number is derived from
> 1,024,000 bytes per "megabyte" (2^10 * 10^6, 1000 * 1024), giving 1.44.
> I can find no defensible reason for that corrupted size for a "megabyte".
> Therefore, I call them "1.4M" (1.40625), NOT "1.44M"
On Tue, 28 Mar 2023, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
Unfortunately, we're stuck with the terminology.
We probably should
call them 2.0 megabyte floppies (at 500Khz, you can fit 12,500
unformatted 8 bit bytes on a track, so 12,500*2*80 = is exactly
2,000,000 bytes.
When the NeXt computer came out, they called its drives "4 Megabyte",
even though they had the same drive mechanism, and they worked fine with
IBM "2.88M" media :-)
I don't have a problem with unformatted capacity, so long as it is
consistently applied, and not compared with somebody else's formatted
capacity.
Or, as the young clerk at the Fedex counter asked the
other day, "What's
a floppy disk?". Yes, Fred, we're THAT old.
At Comdex and West Coast Computer Faire, I used an advertising slogan of
"save your data from extinction". In the booth, we had some inflatable
dinosaurs, including a T. Rex taking a bite out of an 8" Verbatim disk.
Some kid came up and told my assistant, "That's not real!"
Bob replied, "Well, of course not, they won't let us bring live dinosaurs
into the exhibt hall."
The kid responded, "not that, stupid. There's no such thing as a disk
like that."
Bob was unable to get the kid to believe that 8" disks had once existed.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com