13 Oct
2012
13 Oct
'12
3:17 p.m.
> The source/vintage makes tham all probably
"1.2M" (anybody who wants to
> argue the impreciseness of that designation can come up with a CONCISE
> (not paragraph long) and unambiguous name for that type of drive)
On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Tony Duell wrote:
5.25", 80 cylinder, 2 head, 360rpm, 500kbps data
rate in MFM mode :-)
. . . "soft-sectores", "IBM/WD style sector
structure", "96TPI (as
opposed to 100tpi)", . . .
That seems to be as concise as we can get when dexcribing it, and
therefore, we NAME it.
"Type 1", 0, 2, 3, 4, 7 is way too arbitrary and obscure.
But I wil lagree that '1.2M' is common usage,
and pretty unambiguous.
Similarly 1.44M for the 500kbps MFM data rate 3.5" drive (I do object to
a 'megabyte' being 10^3*2^10 bytes, but it's common usage...)
"common MIS-usage"
I over-react to that particular idiocy. For me, that is worse than DB9 or
56K-baud.
But, I find that when I call them "1.4M", nobody, even in the general
public seems to have difficulty understanding! At 1.40625 MB, "1.4M" is
close enough. In addition, it is the same number of characters as 160K,
180K, 320K, 360K, 720K, 1.2M, and 2.8M which is convenient for my personal
data storage.