personal history of personal computers

On the issue of the Cat re-formatting disks that it couldn't read, my suggestion was that they should add enough circuitry that it could recognize the existence of FM, MFM, and GCR formats. Then, it could say, "This disk appears to already be formatted for a different kind of machine. Would you like to erase it and reformat for this machine?" I offered to provide data, so that if it could also identify recording format, number of sides formatted, and maybe even bytes per sector and sectors per track, it could expand the massge to include "The following machines are some of the possibilities of what it is formatted for:" . . . and, of course, the ultimate would be to implement some other file systems, so that it could access what was on the disk. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com