"The Hard Disk You've Been Waiting For"

On 27 Apr 2010 at 20:53, Steve Maddison wrote: Consider the time and the target audience (S100 users). Most probably running some flavor of CP/M. So you're dealing with a "flat" file system with a fixed number of directory slots (512 was common for hard disks; a large file was broken into "extents", with each extent occupying its own slot). So there was a finite limit to the number of files that could be placed on such a device. I seem to recall also that the official CP/M volume size lmitation was somewhere around 8 MB. Not as restrictive as, say, the Apple II scheme of making a (IMI?) hard disk look like 50 floppies, but there are limits. I recall getting in an SA4000-series 14" drive with 40MB on it and having to modify the BIOS to partition it into several CP/M drives. At about the same time we were deploying 7 and 14 MB Rodime 5.25" drives, I remember that we received a sample drive from Evotek that was something like 50MB (had a plexiglas HDA cover, so that was kind of cool to watch). I don't think I ever saw that drive sold. I stilll have the documentation somewhere. --Chuck