hard-sector 5 1/4 disk

From: M H Stein <mhstein_at_usa.net>
Date: Thu Nov 1 02:23:31 2001

Now that you jog the old grey cells, of course you're right; in fact, the
manual states "You should make sure that you buy diskettes for SOFT
SECTORED FORMAT (in caps!)...

What confused my recollection was that I remembered making a few bucks
selling hard-sectored diskettes to PET dealers when the FDDs first came
out, but now that I think back it was probably
because they were cheap & we'd discovered that they'd work, not because
they were required.

I did think that the high-density drives used at least one index hole, but
no, just looked inside the
8050 and no sensors; wrong again (and how many times have I ranted to
myself that people who
don't know what they're talking about should keep their mouth shut).

In the words of the immortal Emily Latella (?) on SNL: never mind...

m

---------------Original message-----------------

Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 18:37:45 -0800 (PST)
From: "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Subject: Re: hard-sector 5 1/4 disk

> Commodore, for one, on their older low density drives.

Commodore, like Apple, was COMPLETELY soft-sector - it ignored the index
pulse COMPLETELY, and therefore would work with hard-sector, soft-sector,
upside down (with write enable notch), ...
Received on Thu Nov 01 2001 - 02:23:31 GMT