Distribution floppies (Was: Microsoft OSs (was: Install Floppies)

[George Rachor]

Was working for Intel in 1985 and bought their system 310 (x286) with 512K of RAM and that whopping 20 Mbyte Hard drive.
Xenix was offered and came on 21 5.25 inch floppies.

George Rachor


> On Jul 24, 2021, at 5:12 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> A very good discussion including the 2M and 2MGUI driver.The author,
> Ciriaco García de Celis sent me the 2M program sometime around 1994.
> 
> It's interesting, and uses 82 cylinders on a DSHD drive and can come
> pretty near to 2M.
> 
> There was also a 2MGUI (having nothing to do with graphics) version that
> could claim to get 2M bytes on a DSHD 3.5" drive in 82 cylinders.   The
> way it was done was to Format one 128-byte sector per track with a
> length indicator of 16KB.  Obviously, 16K won't fit on a track, so when
> writing, the drive was deselected the next time the index came around,
> cutting the transfer short. Actually, I think a 200 msec timer was used
> for the cutoff.   You didn't get the sector CRC transfered, but you got
> what amounts to a full track of data in an odd-sized (not a power of 2)
> sector.   Reading, of course, didn't care about the excess data.
> 
> That's perhaps the most extreme case I can think of; it's discussed here:
> 
> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/floppy-capacity-math/
> 
> No way I would ever trust this for archival purposes--and I replied to
> the author the same way.  Heck, I wouldn't trust writing on cylinders
> 80,81, given the quality of DSHD media.
> 
> All of this was academic after a bit as Zip, Jaz, Sparq, etc. external
> drives became very common.
> 
> --Chuck
> 
> 
> 
>