20 Sep
2004
20 Sep
'04
8:01 p.m.
> 12", if it ever existed, was NEVER common.
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Ronald Wayne wrote:
Okay, I cannot find the original references so I make
a retraction.
For what it's worth: the original reference was in the context of
Apple II systems, and both 8" and 12" floppies were mentioned. It was
also second hand information.
Apple ][ was 5.25".
There were some aftermarket add-ons for 8" (Sorrento Valley Associates)
There was no 12" floppy.
In addition to
the physical varieties, there are thousands of physically
similar disks with mutually incompatible formats.
<snip>
YOU might not care, but that is pretty damn
insensitive towards those of
us who DO need and use them.
Sorry for the sweeping, and personal, statement. Nah. I'll retract
that apology too. I am allowed to have my own opinion after all. ;)
To reiterate, I was only concerned about transfering data between
different platforms. The "mutually incompatible formats" is a big
problem there. Splitting files across multiple floppies is also a
pain, because
floppies don't have enough capacity in most cases these days (I will
acknowledge that some people may differ on that point).
MS-DOS is seriously lacking in good ways to split a file!
BACKUP would do it, but the early versions of BACKUP prepended a header
that made it inconvenient to reassemble the file without using RESTORE.
A C compiler or Assembler for demo use in class fits easily
on a floppy with plenty of room for sample files.
But for CAB (Computer Assisted Bloat), such as Visual C++,
a floppy is, indeed, woefully too small for anything past "Hello, world".
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com