4 floppy disk drives on a PC?

[Jim Leonard]

Fred Cisin wrote:
> The early PS/2 drives did NOT have a sensor.  They would "successfully"
> format a 720K diskette to 1.4M.  (Reliability was less than perfect due
> to 600 Oersted v 750 )  But then, when that disk was put into a
> drive that had a sensor, the drive would have problems with it.

LOL!  This brings back many memories.  My friend and I had done this on his 
PS/2 and thought we were laughing all the way to the bank... I even saw an 
advertisement in Byte in the late 1980s hawking a 3.5" DSDD hole puncher that 
could turn 720K disks into 1.4MB disks.  I didn't want to shell out $29.95 for 
the puncher so I started burning holes into my 3.5" disks with my soldering 
iron :-D

So what was the catch?  The devil, as they say, is in the details, and some of 
the details are hidden in the advertising copy of the puncher: "We tested over 
100 punched disks for over a month, writing and reading data.  With the 
exception of only one disk, THERE WERE NO FAILURES AT ANY TIME!" (emphasis not 
mine).  What's wrong with this picture?  They continually wrote to the disks. 
What I found in practice was that, if you kept writing to the disk, it did 
indeed work.  But leave the disk in storage for 6 months, and *poof*, your data 
started to fade.  As soon as I discovered this (by losing source code, argh!), 
I copied the data off of my disks, covered up the holes I had burned with 
stickers, reformatted the disks at the proper 720K, compressed the data, and 
put it back on the disk :)
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)                    http://www.oldskool.org/
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