On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Tony Duell wrote: There are certainly some really bizarre ones. The Victor 9000 (aka Sirius) is MUCH weirder than the Rainbow. The Rainbow format for CP/M isn't very unusual. 'course there are thousands (I estimate 2500) mutually incompatible floppy formats. But the Rainbow MS-DOS format is truly unique. It is the only one that I've seen that doesn't have the DIRectory on track 0. IIRC, it was Mark Graybill? (Media Master) who wrote a group of programs to run on the Rainbow to read and write some PC formats, and some programs to partially emoulate some of the PC quirks. The Rainbow was a nice machine, whose biggest problem AND feature was its uniqueness. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Tony Duell wrote: But even it isn't the weirdest machine. The Lisa's floppy drive was weirder than the Victor 9000's. No, just a track or so in from the edge. IIRC, track 1 instead of track 0. I guess that that was to put it in the same place as their CP/M DIRectory. There is a field (don't remember which) in the MS-DOS "BIOS Parameter Block" for "hidden" or "reserved" extra sectors.