<Of course, there are also machines with floppy drive systems that cannot d
<a low-level format. The most classic 8" floppy drive systems (specifically
<the IBM 3740) can't format floppies, for example. There are also 5.25"
Most of the S100 and other 8" systems could but the DEC and IBM systems
didn't as was the case for some of the systems like AES data.
<floppy drive systems that can't format - for example, the RX50 on a DEC
<Q-bus or Unibus controller. (On some Rainbows, it is possible to low-leve
<format RX50 media directly.)
Rx50 format can be fomatted by any system (usually s100, or cpm based) with
a WD 179x or later controller as it is a slightly bastard format that only
that chip can do.
Others like the older intel MDS800/200 systems with the DD drives (m^2FM)
could format but nothing else could read that format.
This ignores the system that used a standard LLformat but had a odd file
structure so data interchange was impossible.
Allison
Received on Tue May 25 1999 - 20:51:04 BST