[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: PBS show



On Thu, 13 Jun 1996, jim bell wrote:

> >The comments about the floppies (" VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were
> >very slow as well") is even more off-base.
> 
> The original Apple II floppy held ONLY 90 kilobytes on a 5" floppy.  How did 
> they do such a bad job?

Wrong.  The _original_ apple 2 floppy held about 130K -- competitive with 
other single-density single-sided floppies of the day... 1 1/2 years later, 
they fit 160K on a single-sided single-density floppy, almost as much as 
an IBM double-density single-sided floppy (180K)  (This is related to the 
fact that the apple used 5+3 encoding, while IBM still uses the 
more-obvious but less-efficient 4+4 -- read _Beneath_Apple_DOS_ for more 
details)

----------
Jon Lasser (410)532-7138                         - Obscenity  is a crutch  for
[email protected]                            inarticulate motherfuckers.
http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/
Finger for PGP key (1024/EC001E4D)               - Fuck the CDA.