8" floppy system needed to recover old game data

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/8/2005 at 1:14 PM Barry Watzman wrote:

>It's not a standard format, but it is actually possible to reliably get
>nine
>sectors of 1024 bytes on each track of a double-density 8" disk.  I
>supported such a format in all of the operating systems that I wrote for
>the
>Zenith Z-100.  It gives you 1,419,264 bytes of formatted storage per
>diskette.

Shades of IBM XDF--and whatever the format that MS used briefly to pack about 1.7MB on a floppy--basically writing combinations of differently sized sectors on a track to use every last available byte.   I think both IBM and MS would probably tell you that it wasn't worth the trouble.  I think both companies ended up sending far more replacement sets of standard-format diskettes than they ever imagined.

Cheers,
Chuck