Bad media (Was: Need Kermit for Xerox 820-II in .IMD format

On Thu, 24 Jan 2013, Jerome H. Fine wrote: Perhaps that was the origin of the silly rumor (although not necessarily false) that MOST media being manufactured had enormous failure rate (higher than 50%?) and that therefore ALL media was tested - those that passed on both sides were sold as DS, those that only failed one side were flipped over to present the "good" side and then sold as SS. And that those that failed BOTH sides were wholesaled to Elephant/BASF/Memorex. Some versions of the stories go so far as to say that finished diskettes were OPENED to flip the media. (based on an assumption that media could not be tested until it was installed in a jacket with sleeve and label) Q: If you had that high a failure rate, what would YOU do about it? Cherry pick out of what should have been trash, marginal media that would test, or test PART, as "good" to market? Q: What impact would the labor cost to do such have on total production cost? Or would you shut it down until you could get adequate quality that no significant portion tested "bad"? Was Verbatim Datalife the result of such a shutdown? NOTE: in the civilized world (as opposed to our industry), manufacturing does SAMPLING of output, and statistically determines whether to take the risk of any bad product, based on the percentage of failures. If one were to actually search through product searching for ANY that could be marketed, then it could be assumed that one would be inundated by product failures. which happened. Similar stories/practices: "RS "32K" RAM were 64K where only one half tested bad" (YES, they were 64K, but who had sufficient quantity to MARKET half-defects?) "486SX were 486DX where FPU tested "bad"" "Windoze was written by one billion monkeys, but they picked the wrong billion" "SS drives (which have cicuitry for second head) have defective second head circuitry" -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com