Rise and fall of MS-DOS floppy FORMAT program

From: John Allain <allain_at_panix.com>
Date: Mon Oct 14 22:09:01 2002

> ...they can not be set to other values like a true variable....

Amen. Thanks for the table, Fred!

I remember when I started getting serious about PC's I bought
the v3.30 reference manual. For FORMAT the ref. entry looked
promising. Sectors and Tracks individually settable, for example.
Several dozen (hundred?) possible parameter combinations.
Then by page four of FORMAT: 20 seperate caveats spelled out
over 4 more pages ('The large print giveth and the small print
taketh away') of what you couldn't do. They then included a table
with five possibilities and concluded "No other combinations are
allowed." by now we're on page 8. Oh, thanks for letting me read
all the other B*S* first.

This may have been the very first (for me at least) of the by now
innumerable MS Gotchas

John A.
Received on Mon Oct 14 2002 - 22:09:01 BST