From: Moltar Ramone <jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 17:45:25 +0800
To: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Subject: Re: PBS show
In-Reply-To: <199606131831.LAA29180@mail.pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960613223218.5810A-100000@rwd.goucher.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Thu, 13 Jun 1996, jim bell wrote:

> >The comments about the floppies (" VERY SMALL capacity floppies (which were
> >very slow as well") is even more off-base.
> 
> The original Apple II floppy held ONLY 90 kilobytes on a 5" floppy.  How did 
> they do such a bad job?

Wrong.  The _original_ apple 2 floppy held about 130K -- competitive with 
other single-density single-sided floppies of the day... 1 1/2 years later, 
they fit 160K on a single-sided single-density floppy, almost as much as 
an IBM double-density single-sided floppy (180K)  (This is related to the 
fact that the apple used 5+3 encoding, while IBM still uses the 
more-obvious but less-efficient 4+4 -- read _Beneath_Apple_DOS_ for more 
details)

----------
Jon Lasser (410)532-7138                         - Obscenity  is a crutch  for
jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu                            inarticulate motherfuckers.
http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/
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