3 ms·

Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope. Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the norma

Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope. Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked. I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on the software side with special formatting programs, but I don't recall it being a thing on the hardware side. Not in the sense of having new official upgrades like 2.88 MB, but drives advertising that they were made 20% better than the official spec and could squeeze more into each standard floppy.

toast0 4y ago
You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well. I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)
- anthk 4y ago
  I used both zip and split.
mkl 4y ago
Most floppy drives were like that. I mostly formatted my nominally 1.44MB disks to 1.72MB (the "unformatted capacity" is 2MB). It worked so reliably on different drives that Microsoft distributed software on disks formatted this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format (it says there that they were harder to copy, but that's not my experience, and MS operating systems supported them directly from about the mid 1990s).

toast0 4y ago

You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well. I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

anthk 4y ago
I used both zip and split.

mkl 4y ago

Most floppy drives were like that. I mostly formatted my nominally 1.44MB disks to 1.72MB (the "unformatted capacity" is 2MB). It worked so reliably on different drives that Microsoft distributed software on disks formatted this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format (it says there that they were harder to copy, but that's not my experience, and MS operating systems supported them directly from about the mid 1990s).