any "preferred" disk format for CP/M on 8-inch double-density floppy?

On 06/13/2014 02:37 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: You really couldn't blame folks for devising their own formats. DRI certainly offered no guidance whatsoever, so unless you wanted to copy someone already in existence, you did the best you could. For example, I figured that it would be convenient to tell single-sided formats from double-sided (drives were introduced later, but it was inevitable that they would appear). So I started single-sided sector addresses with 128--and double-sided with 192. That way, no matter where you were on the floppy, a simple Read ID would tell you what you had. My hat is off to the OEMs who worked out rotational and head latency (complete with settling times) when reading from successive sectors/sides/cylinders and then devised their interleave scheme around that. A lot of OEMs didn't like the idea of dynamically allocating files block by block as done by CP/M. I've seen several systems where files are pre-allocated with the option of freeing any unused space. I guess CP/M, like MS-DOS, is what it is and folks just figured out how to press it into service. --Chuck