offer - OS/2 for the PDP-11

Somebody wrote (sorry--I lost the original digest:) They're more common than you'd think, particularly in OS for industrial machinery, such as CAD equipment and embroidery machines. Typically, the diskette is written only once for a particular job (usually as a paper tape substitute) and read over and over again. In those cases, it makes perfect sense. Non-contiguous floppy files can be a real drag on the older floppy- based systems that used drives with very slow positioners (now, why does "Micropolis" immediately come to mind?). A scheme that involves contiguous allocation with a fixed number of shots at extending (in case you mis-estimated the size) works well on slow floppy systems. For many single-user applications, it's possible to employ an "allocate the remainder of the disk and truncate on close" scheme. It's also a piece of soup/duck cake to recover files from a floppy using contiguous allocation where the directory and allocation information has been destroyed. (Even better to incorporate recovery information throughout the diskette instead of one track that gets hit over and over again, but that's another story). (Have you ever had to recover a "work" floppy full of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet data without a directory or FAT?) More related to the topic is that DEC VMS FILES11 had an incredibly complicated floppy file system. Maybe BTOS was worse... Cheers, Chuck