On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> Probably straight out of some textbook.
That would certainly make sense.
But I'll bet you a Dysan 8" alignment disk that you can't find WHICH
textbook caused them to BOTH use a linked list of 12 bit entries
representing allocation blocks, starting in the second sector, with
entries 0 and 1 reserved. That is a little too much coincidence if it
were to neither be a common source, nor Apple programmers being influenced
by the Microsoft structure.
The MS-DOS path to it can be traced to Patterson sharing a WCCF booth with
Microsoft, and being fascinated by the table that Microsoft used in either
NEC or NCR stand-alone basic. But that was mid-disk, NOT 12 bit entries,
and without 0 and 1 reserved.
(The MS-DOS encyclopedia says NCR, but I haven't seen an NCR
implementation, and the NEC implementation was in the right time frame)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin_at_xenosoft.com
Received on Thu Apr 25 2002 - 22:17:22 BST