On Tue, 23 Jan 2018, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
The Compaticard IV and a few other ISA cards support
ED mode also.
But again, why? I still have a box of the Imation ED floppies (barium
ferrite). The price was ridiculous for floppies of the time.
Until CD-rOM became the standard for software distribution, doubling the
capacity per floppy was always good news. And there was always the hopee
that media price would come down "once they catch on".
2.8M seemed far more likely to catch on than "Floptical" (20MB)
I was often wrong about such things; I thought that surely Microsoft would
fix SMARTDRV before releasing Windoze 3.10, but that didn't happen until
DOS 6.20
Being part of the problem, . . .
I was very happy in 1991, to finally find Windoze 3.0 and 3.1 on
CD-ROM, to stop juggling several dozen installation floppies.