30 Aug
2006
30 Aug
'06
9:02 a.m.
On Monday 28 August 2006 11:30 pm, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Mike Loewen wrote:
There are some trivial errors in that article, but MOST of it is correct;
be careful about relying wikipedia for accuracy.
Does anybody know WHICH bar the bar napkin sized disk is based on?
I want a napkin from that bar!
From the wikipedia article:
"In 1976 two of Shugart Associates's employees, Jim Adkisson and Don
Massaro, were approached by An Wang of Wang Laboratories, who felt that
the 8-inch format was simply too large for the desktop word processing
machines he was developing at the time. After meeting in a bar in Boston,
Adkisson asked Wang what size he thought the disks should be, and Wang
pointed to a napkin and said "about that size". Adkisson took the napkin
back to California, found it to be 5.25 inches (13 cm) wide, and developed
a new drive of this size storing 98.5 kB later increased to 110 kB by
adding 5 tracks.[2] This is believed to be the first standard computer
media that was not promulgated by IBM."
I don't believe this.
The earliest, biggest 14" platters were a result of what would fit within the
17" of space in a standard rack cabinet. The 8" drive is (to me) that size
because you can put two of them in that space side-by-side. The 5.25" size
is because you can put _three_ of them in that space...
And the story I've heard about the 3.5" size is that it fits in the pocket of
a typical men's shirt. <shrug>
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin