8 Oct
2005
8 Oct
'05
10:30 a.m.
On 10/8/2005 at 1:14 PM Barry Watzman wrote:
It's not a standard format, but it is actually
possible to reliably get
nine
sectors of 1024 bytes on each track of a double-density 8" disk. I
supported such a format in all of the operating systems that I wrote for
the
Zenith Z-100. It gives you 1,419,264 bytes of formatted storage per
diskette.
Shades of IBM XDF--and whatever the format that MS used briefly to pack about 1.7MB on a
floppy--basically writing combinations of differently sized sectors on a track to use
every last available byte. I think both IBM and MS would probably tell you that it
wasn't worth the trouble. I think both companies ended up sending far more
replacement sets of standard-format diskettes than they ever imagined.
Cheers,
Chuck