Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!udel!ee.udel.edu From: new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: UNIX sys V4.0 Message-ID: <34682@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Date: 26 Oct 90 16:47:46 GMT References: <1990Oct22.041358.22745@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <2608@cirrusl.UUCP> Sender: usenet@ee.udel.edu Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 30 Nntp-Posting-Host: estelle.ee.udel.edu In article <2608@cirrusl.UUCP> dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes: >Those who doubt the importance of this should remember CP/M. Part of >the reason MS-DOS became so popular (apart from the fact that IBM >backed it) was that for the first time in many years, a standard for >magnetic media emerged -- the good old 360 K double-sided double- >density floppy disk. Bull puckey. CP/M had a standard disk format. 8" floppyies, 26 sectors per track, 128 bytes per sector, 80 tracks (if I remember right). I.e., the original IBM floppy format. The Radio Shack model II used this, as did various other "high performance" machines, MP/M machines, and a few multi-CPU machines. Only the 5" floppies were non-standard formats, and only late in its life did CP/M start to be really used on 5" floppies. The only reason that MS-DOS only had one floppy format is that clones duplicated all the hardware because the OS wasn't portable enough to include other drivers easily and programs came to take advantage of the hardware, making it unprofitable to make MS-DOS machines that were not PC-DOS machines. Remember the Wang computer? How about the TRS-2000? Both were MS-DOS machines that were not PC-DOS. Both essentially died at birth. We are starting to see the same kind of problem now with 360K disks, 320K disks, 1.44M disks, 3.5" disks, and so on. There are still fewer disk formats because many programs that run under PC-DOS don't run under MS-DOS and thus cloners make their hardware PC-DOS compatible and therefore use only PC-DOS disk formats. -- Darren -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware --- ----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee -----