17 May
2005
17 May
'05
4:58 p.m.
On Tue, 17 May 2005, Fred Cisin wrote:
While the goal is certainly simple (to be able to
generate duplicates
of odd diskettes without requiring human manual intervention), there
does not exist a method of describing a disk format in a practical way,
that does not require SOME manual handling of exceptions.
Although the number of exceptions is theoretically finite,
for ANY proposed specification, one or more of us can come
up with an exception. Therefore, it remains necessary to
retain a "comment" field to be able to specify additional
"weirdities", especially if the spec is to be opened up
enough to deal with "copy protected" disks.
Not only will FK allow comments, it should also allow exceptions to be
specified in a manner that can be algorithmically processed.
OTOH, it would be gross overkill to store the complete
bitstream
without clock separation of every track on disks that could be
defined as "5.25 DSDD 48TPI WD/IBM 5SPT 1024BPS, no known oddities",
just because SOME (a few thousand) disk formats DO have strange
things to deal with.
Right, and the FK spec allows imaging at different levels (from flux
transitions to fully interpreted filesystems).
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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