The Millennium Bug

[Bletchleyite]

Thanks for that - most informative! DD->HD was more sectors, not more tracks, wasn't it?

To add a note, some OSs managed to squeeze a bit more out, I think by writing more areas of the disk - such as Acorn RISC OS used to get 1.6Mb on a HD floppy instead of 1.44. (One of the many ways in which that plucky little British company was well ahead of the curve - as a small reminder to anyone using a Windows machine, that's also where your taskbar came from!)

 

[dgl]

Here we have 4 drives, the Generalmusic S2 and Roland S330, an internal drive in the desktop and a USB floppy (primarily used to copy disks for the S330 w/SDISKW). The S2 (like RISC OS, and I believe Amiga/ST) formats to 1.6Mb.

 

[krus_aragon]

Thanks for that - most informative! DD->HD was more sectors, not more tracks, wasn't it?

To add a note, some OSs managed to squeeze a bit more out, I think by writing more areas of the disk - such as Acorn RISC OS used to get 1.6Mb on a HD floppy instead of 1.44. (One of the many ways in which that plucky little British company was well ahead of the curve - as a small reminder to anyone using a Windows machine, that's also where your taskbar came from!)

No, DD -> HD was a change in the magnetic surface. You could have whatever number of tracks or sectors, in whatever modulation you wanted (as long as your floppy drive controller chip supported it). Tracks are the concentric circles of data, and the number of these and their spacing is determined by the stepper motor that moves the read/write heads. The number of sectors is equivalent to slices of pizza: you decide ho many pieces to cut the circle into.

In practicality, Floppy drive technology reached 96tpi back in the DD days, so all HD drives were 96tpi ones (but could double-step to behave like 48tpi if you wanted them to.)

As for the 1.6MB RISC OS, Microsoft did something similar with a custom floppy format that they used for DOS/Windows installation floppies, stuffing a single ~1.6Mb archive on each disk saved a few floppies, especially if you were installing Windows 95 from floppies!

 

[Giugiaro]

Absolutely. I've had the displeasure of having to use Libre Office for spreadsheets recently. Just give me proper Office! It works!

Some magazines over here say that Google Docs is the future...

After getting used to do documents in Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, just the idea of using those online apps generally scare me. (I was forced for a while to use them because some fellow graduates didn't know better... *sigh*)