It would read magnetic storage devices that resembled giant floppies.
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Then [came] more speed, more ram, distribution on floppies, CDs, DVDs, and the internet.
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Just as my storage needs were ballooning, an alternative to floppies quickly gained traction.
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At my first job at a tiny weekly newspaper in 1986, we used 8-inch floppies and a Digital Equipment Corp.
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The Air Force has done a great job in the last two years to modernize that stuff and get off floppies.
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Until not too long ago, you would purchase an application and get a physical copy on a bunch of floppies (or later a CD).
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Floppies hung on for a number of years, but Sony — the last floppy disk maker on earth — stopped manufacturing disks in March of 2011.
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And lastly, Halle Berry wants you to ditch your dollar-store flippy floppies for a more sophisticated, modern take on the beach sandal this summer.
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Those of us who had to deal with floppies will recall that a standard 3.5-inch disc only had about 1.4mb storage after being formatted.
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Floppies pushing 30 to 35 years old can still be reliable, the video says—others, perhaps not so much, requiring a floppy drive emulator to run.
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Photo: GizmodoI don't have my swim trunks or my flippy-floppies, and there aren't any dolphins anywhere, but you can't stop me 'cause I'm on a boat.
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Soon, I got my own Mac — a beige Mac Plus with no hard drive, requiring me to constantly swap floppies in and out of the disk drive.
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"I looked at it, and it brought back memories for me of my first floppies, multimedia PCs, and it made me feel a bit old," he tells The Verge.
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"I have a collection of 1,000 5.25" floppies in a storage room that need to be migrated to modern computers—programs I had written or things that were unique.
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Made for the Apple II and other early personal computers, All About America comes on two 5.25-inch floppies, and teaches players with a combination of text and pixelated images.
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The floppies, previously thought lost, were found by the original author, CM Ralph, and sent to Borman by the efforts of Temple University professor Adrienne Shaw of the LGBTQ Game Archive.
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Much of Doom's initial cultural impact was in how those people who traded floppies with each other of Doom's free "shareware" episode treated the game as some kind of mystery manifestation of an alternate reality.
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"The extremely compact programs make it possible to place QNX's 50 utilities on a single floppy disk and make it possible for the QNX system to work on a machine with 128k and floppies," Christian wrote.
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I'm not going to question business users who still cling on to their old CDs and DVDs, especially not in light of the Pentagon's admission that it relies on floppies for top-secret national security stuff.
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It can't load 5¼-inch floppies anymore, but it apparently can handle CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs that easily fit into the drive's original slot, which still has a functional drop-down door on the front.
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So, he's heading up a call-out for anyone and everyone to physically send him their old Apple II floppies so they can be preserved and uploaded to the Archive for all to enjoy with the site's emulator.
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Windows NT 3.1 supports an uninterruptible power supply. Windows NT 3.1 could be installed either by using the CD-ROM and a provided boot disk, or by utilizing a set of twenty-two 3.5" floppies (twenty-three floppies for Advanced Server). Windows NT 3.1 could also be installed over the network. A coupon was included that made it possible to order a set of twenty-seven 5.25" floppies (or twenty-eight floppies for Advanced Server).
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Manitoba has no activation routine and does not store the original boot sector on floppies; Manitoba simply overwrites the original boot sector. 2.88MB EHD floppies are corrupted by the virus. Manitoba uses 2KB memory while resident.
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Compared to the floppies, the CD-ROM contained additional drivers and applications.
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Around the perimeter of the field are four stations for human players, who may throw floppies to each other or onto the playing field. Two additional areas around the field are for the human players who control the robots. At the start of each match, each human player station contains three of the alliance's floppies. Four floppies per alliance are located on the playing field.
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Atari ST native format uses 5 sectors for FAT12 entries, while MSDOS uses 3 sectors for double sided floppies and 2 sectors for single sided floppies. Although the number of sectors for the FAT12 entries is included on track 0, MSDOS ignores it and assumes 2 (single sided) or 3 sectors (double sided). The Atari ST uses that info, so it can operate with floppies formatted either way. Achieving successful data interchange between the two platforms normally meant using floppies formatted by MSDOS, or by third party formatting utilities that were later released for the Atari ST. Conversion utilities such as MOSDOS.
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Library resources include text and reference books, CDs, floppies, and subscription to 10 daily newspapers and three magazines.
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VGA-Copy was a MS-DOS software to copy floppy disks. It was able to read erroneous floppies.
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8-inch floppies typically came low-level formatted and were filled with a format filler value of `0xE5`. Since the 1990s, most 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppies have been shipped pre-formatted from the factory as DOS FAT12 floppies. In current IBM mainframe operating systems derived from OS/360 or DOS/360, this may be done as part of allocating a file, by a utility specific to the file system or, in some older access methods, on the fly as new data are written.
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The playing field is a carpeted, rectangular area. Alliances score points by positioning "floppies," their robots, and a "puck" on the playing field. "Floppies" are light-weight, pillow-like objects with Velcro-loop material located in its centre and around its perimeter. The "puck" is a short, octagonal platform that rolls freely on castor wheels.
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VGA-Copy was popular because it could often read erroneous floppies. It did so by automatically doing multiple read retries on errors. Furthermore, VGA-Copy could read floppy images and save them in a format with the extension .vcp. A special feature of VGA-Copy was the ability to format floppies with capacities beyond the normal specification.
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It was able to scan floppies for boot sector viruses with an internal heuristic and could also scan the full floppy with F-Prot.
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Alcon is a standard boot sector virus that spreads via floppies. Instead of the MBR, it infects the DBR, making some antivirus programs miss it.
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Bootable floppy disks ("boot floppies") for PCs usually contain DOS or miniature versions of Linux. The most commonly available floppy disk can hold only 1.4 MB of data in its standard format, making it impractical for loading large operating systems. The use of boot floppies is in decline, due to the availability of other higher-capacity options, such as CD-ROMs or USB flash drives.
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IBM developed, and several companies copied, an autoloader mechanism that can load a stack of floppies one at a time into a drive. These are very bulky systems, and suffer from media hangups and chew-ups more than standard drives, but they were a partial answer to replication and large removable storage needs. The smaller 5¼- and 3½-inch floppies made this a much easier technology to perfect.
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Each match is two minutes long. Alliances receive one point for each of their floppies that are over the playing field, not in contact with the surface of the playing field, and less than 8 feet above the surface of the playing field. Floppies that are 8 feet or more above the playing field earn 3 points for the alliance it belongs to. Any robot on the puck multiplies its alliance's score by 3.
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As an example, any computer compatible with the IBM PC is able with built-in software to load the contents of the first 512 bytes of a floppy and to execute it if it is a viable program; boot floppies have a very simple loader program in these bytes. The process is vulnerable to abuse; data floppies could have a virus written to their first sector which silently infects the host computer if switched on with the disk in the drive.
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Rupert Goodwins, "Online communities turn twenty-five".Smart Computing Encyclopedia: Ward Christensen. Christensen was noted for building software tools for his needs. He wrote a cassette-based operating system before floppies and hard disks were common.
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In all models, including the last, the monitor's casing included the CPU, RAM, floppy disk drives and power supply for all of the systems' components. All except the last included a printer in the price. Early models used 3-inch floppy disks, while those sold from 1991 onwards used 3½-inch floppies, which became the industry standard around the time the PCW series was launched. A variety of inexpensive products and services were launched to copy 3-inch floppies to the 3½-inch format so that data could be transferred to other machines.
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The CMD FD series was Creative Micro Designs (CMD)'s range of third-party floppy disk drives for the Commodore 8-bit line of home computers. Using 3½" floppy disks, they provided a significantly larger storage capacity than Commodore-produced drives; the FD-2000 offered 1600 kB of storage using standard double-sided, high-density floppies, while the FD-4000 also allowed the use of 3200 kB extra-high density (ED) floppies. In contrast, the Commodore 1581 3½" drive only supported 800 kB double-sided, double-density disks.
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Other books included the "Call-A.P.P.L.E. In Depth" series and the "Call-A.P.P.L.E. Compendium" series which were primarily related to the source code listings from the magazines. Most of these books included floppies classified in the Anthology series.
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The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22. One option for the Indy is a floptical drive. The floptical uses 21 MB disks, but is able to read and write standard magnetic floppies as well.
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A GPT can coexist with an MBR in order to provide some limited form of backward compatibility for older systems. MBRs are not present on non-partitioned media such as floppies, superfloppies or other storage devices configured to behave as such.
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TOS could convert a native ST formatted floppy to a MSDOS compatible floppy. Other utilities allowed for transfer with unusual formats, such as the Commodore Amiga. Atari's own version 1.4 (and later) TOS upgrades, switched to formatting MSDOS compatible floppies.
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Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies is the name for a never-made fourth installment, often regarded as an in-joke. The name, used by official sources and fans, refers to rumors that the reason for the cancellation of the game was the losing of the game's original production floppies, after which the developers refused to remake the game from scratch. Other sources claim that it was nothing but an internal office prank. The franchise's installments were numbered as if this installment had been published; the actual fourth installment was Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work.
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It's ROM BASIC supported the cassette tape interface, but PC DOS did not, limiting use of that interface to BASIC only. PC DOS version 1.00 supported only 160 kB SSDD floppies, but version 1.1, which was released nine months after the PC's introduction, supported 160 kB SSDD and 320 kB DSDD floppies. Support for the slightly larger nine sector per track 180 kB and 360 kB formats was added in March 1983. Third-party software support grew extremely quickly, and within a year the PC platform was supplied with a vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose.
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DOS produced by Optimized Systems Software. Compatible with DOS 2.0 - Allowed the use of Double Density floppies. Unlike most ATARI DOSses, this used a command line instead of a menu. DOS XL provided a menu program in addition to the command line.
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It included the ability to hold over 20 pages of typing, and would have provided a calculator, multi-alarm clock, calculator, and several other convenience functions. When connected to the VideoWRITER itself through the RJ-14 keyboard connector, documents could be uploaded to the VideoWRITER's floppy disk and printed. The hardware chassis was from Kyocera, and was essentially the same as the RadioShack TRS-100 portable computer. Recognizing that the ink cartridges and the special VideoWRITER floppies (which included a dictionary) were ephemeral, the application designed included the ability for the VideoWRITER to recognize blank 3-1/2 floppies and format them for VideoWRITER use (although without the dictionary feature).
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The signature is tested for by most System BIOSes since (at least) the IBM PC/AT (but not by the original IBM PC and some other machines). Even more so, it is also checked by most MBR boot loaders before passing control to the boot sector. Some BIOSes (like the IBM PC/AT) perform the check only for fixed disk / removable drives, while for floppies and superfloppies it is enough to start with a byte greater or equal to and the first nine words not to contain the same value, before the boot sector is accepted as valid, thereby avoiding the explicit test for , on floppies. Since old boot sectors (i.e.
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FFS support was merged into the ROM-based filesystem from Kickstart 2.0 onwards, and so it was no longer necessary to install FFS in the RDB. The ability to load filesystems from the RDB still remained available in case one wished to fix ROM bugs, get new FFS features, or use a third-party filesystem. Floppies are unpartitioned devices without a RDB and also do not use the autobooting mechanism, so were only bootable if the disk's dostype was one the ROM-based filesystem understood. As a result, FFS-formatted floppies were not bootable until the release of Kickstart 2.0, and mounting them under Workbench 1.3 involved some ugly unsupported hacks.
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The term has, however, been used by some to refer to only a portion of that process, in which every sector of the drive is written to; usually by writing a specific value to every addressable location on the disk. Traditionally, the physical sectors were initialized with a fill value of `0xF6` as per the INT 1Eh's Disk Parameter Table (DPT) during format on IBM compatible machines. This value is also used on the Atari Portfolio. 8-inch CP/M floppies typically came pre- formatted with a value of `0xE5`, and by way of Digital Research this value was also used on Atari ST and some Amstrad formatted floppies.
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1440 KB floppies had a hole so that drives could identify them from 720 KB floppies, preventing users from formatting the smaller capacity disks to the higher capacity (doing so would work, but with a higher tendency of data loss). Clone manufacturers implemented the hole detection, but IBM did not. As a result of this a 720 KB floppy could be formatted to 1440 KB in a PS/2, but the resulting floppy would only be readable by a PS/2 machine. PS/2s primarily used Mitsubishi floppy drives and did not use a separate Molex power connector; the data cable also contained the power supply lines.
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In recent years, the Emulator II has risen in popularity due to the resurgence in 1980s pop culture, with new artists wishing to revive the Emulator-based sound. Prices for functioning units have gone up, and websites dedicated to selling the original floppies have now emerged.
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1 was distributed by Year01.com and runme.org, initially by ROM and emulator on floppies across North America, and later online. It has been compared with Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds as an example of games as art object, and "reduction and abstraction of the source material".
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In 1983 the Sony 3.5" became available and single and paired units were supplied to dealers in the NewBrain cream cases. The 3.5" 800 kB discs also got a more effective format allowing the files from 4x200 kB floppies to be stored on one 800 kB disc.
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The UHD144 drive surfaced early in 1998 as the it drive, and provides 144 MB of storage while also being compatible with the standard 1.44 MB floppies. The drive was slower than its competitors but the media was cheaper, running about US$8 at introduction and US$5 soon after.
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Versions of the floppy drive was released in minimal quantity for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, and some computers made in Eastern Germany were also equipped with one. The floppies are single sided and can hold up to 149 KB of data when MFM formatted. The drives were compatible with contemporary floppy controllers.
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However, on May 27, 1987, an OEM version was released by IBM, which added VGA support, PS/2 mouse support, MCGA support, and support for the 8514/A display driver. IBM released this version on three 3.5 inch 720k floppies, and offered it as part of their "Personal Publishing System" and "Collegiate Kit" bundles.
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The Linux kernel has ADFS support for E format and later. NetBSD has filecore support in NetBSD 1.4 onwards. Tools such as Omniflop (in Windows 2000 and later), and Libdsk support permit the 'physical' layout of ADFS floppies to be read on PC systems utilising an internal drive. However the logical structure remains unimplemented.
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This required DEC owners to buy higher-priced, specially formatted floppy media, which was harder to obtain through standard distribution channels. DEC attempted to enforce exclusive control over its floppy media sales by copyrighting its proprietary disk format, and requiring a negotiated license agreement and royalty payments from anybody selling compatible media. The proprietary data format meant that RX50 floppies were not interchangeable with other PC floppies, further isolating DEC products from the developing de facto standard PC market. Hardware hackers and DEC enthusiasts eventually reverse- engineered the RX50 format, This relatively recent work is a well-developed example of programs to enhance interchange of data between DEC formatted media and standard PC systems but the damage had already been done, in terms of market confusion and isolation.
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The IBM eXtended Density Format (XDF) is a way of superformatting standard high-density 3½-inch and 5¼-inch floppy disks to larger-than-standard capacities. It is supported natively by IBM's PC DOS versions 7 and 2000 and by OS/2 Warp 3 onward, using the XDF and XDFCOPY commands (directly in OS/2). When formatted as XDF disks, 3½-inch floppies can hold 1860 kB, and 5¼-inch floppies can hold 1540 kB, using different number of sectors as well as different sector size per track (not all sectors in the same track are of the same size). However, the first cylinder uses standard formatting, providing a small FAT12 section that can be accessed without XDF support and on which can be put a ReadMe file or the XDF drivers.
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WHDLoad is a utility to install legacy Amiga games on a hard disk and load them from Workbench desktop instead of floppies, on which they were often delivered. jst is an older utility which the developer abandoned in order to concentrate efforts on WHDLoad. Old jstloaders can be read with WHDLoad, and jst itself has some early level of WHDLoad compatibility.
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To run the installer from a MS-DOS based operating system such as Windows 98 or Windows ME, the user must start the system "in DOS mode" and then execute I386/WINNT.EXE on the CD- ROM. A floppy disk containing MS-DOS can be used to start the installer. Versions of the installer in floppies were also available for sale.
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Explicitly defining a file system as rw can alleviate some problems in file systems that default to read only, as can be the case with floppies or NTFS partitions. ; `sync` / `async` : How the input and output to the filesystem should be done. sync means it is done synchronously. Looking at the example fstab, this is the option used with the floppy.
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The college has a central library with 40,000 volumes, 9,200 titles, 120 Indian periodicals and 56 international periodicals AICTE consortium online journals 601. The library has a collection of more than 1,400 CDs and floppies. A number of books for the preparation of competitive exams like GATE, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, Defense Service and Civil Service are available in both reference and issue sections.
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It was partially designed by Austrian professor Dieter Hammer. They also copied the ROM cartridge system from their Videopac G7000 game system. One of these cartridges contained Microsoft BASIC. It was also possible to use cassette tape floppies. Although the Teletext video chip permitted a quick entry into the home computer market, it was also the major weakness of the P2000T.
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It was able to format floppy disks with a specified capacity of 1,4 Megabytes with up to 1,7 Megabytes of capacity (see also 2M). It also supported the Distribution Media Format used by Microsoft. To access such over-formatted floppies VGA-Copy delivered a special persistent DOS driver. VGA-Copy had the ability to compress images with the ARJ packer.
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Following requests from game developers, such as The Bitmap Brothers, who were keen to implement more complex protection checks, Northen wrote subroutines that developers could implement to their own liking. In 1990, he purchased a disk duplicator and used it to create floppies with Copylock serial numbers embedded in them, which he would then send to developers in lieu of the protected master disks, along with the Copylock routines for them to include in their games. This Copylock series could accommodate more recent games with multi-load or spanning across multiple floppies. It also allowed for protection checks to be included at arbitrary points in the game code: one example of this was the Hook computer game by Ocean Software, which included an in-game protection check that if failed would cause a key item, namely a mug, to disappear from the game.
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In 1990, an attempt was made to standardize details for a 20 megabyte 3½-inch format floppy. At the time, "three different technologies that are not interchangeable" existed. One major goal was that the to-be-developed standard drive be backward compatible: that it be able to read 720K and 1.44Mb floppies. From a conceptual point of view, superfloppies are treated as unpartitioned media.
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It is a commercial product, and a slightly cut-down version was included with AmigaOS beginning with version 2.1. The FAT95 library recognizes partitions of various filesystems common in other systems such as FAT16 and FAT32. It also reads DOS floppies and USB pen drives formatted with FAT16 or FAT32. Filesystems like ext2 for Linux, NTFS from Microsoft, and more are supported by third-party developers.
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But we worked it > out very amicably with that other publisher and we agreed to change his name > and costume a bit. Not any drama or anything, it was all very civil. The > good thing is the name changed, but the story is exactly the same. And that > original printing of Doctor Star trades and floppies will probably be > collector’s items to a degree now, I guess.
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Supply of Publications : The Institute has published many illustrated leaflets and bulletins for dissemination of crop information to the farmers. The publications are made in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu. Supply of Computer floppies and print outs : The institute has also made information available on floppy disks and as print-outs. Supply of seeds : Supply of seeds in packets are also undertaken by the institute.
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Despite this it was rarely used on floppies, particularly because of the cache eating precious space, and because of the limited space preventing a large number of files to cache in the first place. The dircache mode lacks a "garbage collection" mechanism, which means that partly filled cache blocks are never consolidated and will keep taking up space. DOS\5: Directory caching with FFS (FFS-DC).
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The developer version required an IBM PC/AT-compatible machine with 640 KB of conventional and 512 KB of extended memory, and either a (monochrome) CGA or an EGA graphics adapter. FlexOS supported a concept of dynamically loadable and unloadable subdrivers, and it came with driver prototypes for floppies, hard disks, printers, serial interfaces, RAM disks, mice and console drivers. During boot, the FLEX286.
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Instead of basing the command processor on CP/M's CCP, which was known for some user unfriendliness, a command line interpreter (COMMAND.COM) based on its MS-DOS counterpart was used. Microsoft also chose its own FAT12 file system over CP/M's filing methods. This ensured that MSX-DOS floppies could be used on an MS-DOS machine, and that only one single formatting and filing system would be used.
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Executable-infecting viruses are dependent on users exchanging software or boot-able floppies and thumb drives so they spread rapidly in computer hobbyist circles. The first worms, network-borne infectious programs, originated not on personal computers, but on multitasking Unix systems. The first well-known worm was the Internet Worm of 1988, which infected SunOS and VAX BSD systems. Unlike a virus, this worm did not insert itself into other programs.
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" Thus, today's overwhelmingly dominant instruction set architecture, used in Intel's x86 family of processors as well as all compatible CPUs from AMD and others, traces its ancestry directly back to CTC. The 2200 had an optional disk drive using Shugart 8" floppies, single-sided, single-density, and was the first commercial computer to include them. The Datapoint 2201 became so popular that CTC later changed its name to Datapoint Corp.
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Intuition was the widget and graphics library that made the GUI work. It was driven by user events through the mouse, keyboard, and other input devices. Due to a mistake made by the Commodore sales department, the first floppies of AmigaOS (released with the Amiga1000) named the whole OS "Workbench". Since then, users and CBM itself referred to "Workbench" as the nickname for the whole AmigaOS (including Amiga DOS, Extras, etc.).
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The game makes great use of many Amiga features such as scales of colors done with raster lines, halfbrite graphics mode for the between-level pictures, three layers of parallax scrolling using dual- playfield mode, in-game palette swapping and continuous flashing of the background palette to simulate additional colors. Featuring three floppies, the game ran on all Amiga computers. In common with other Amiga titles, the music was created with sampled sounds.
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Shane's advisers feared this would undermine the credibility of the product. However, Elephant eventually became viewed as a premium product, eventually becoming one of the highest-margin floppies on the market and one of the best-selling media brands in history. Leading Edge sold the computer aftermarket division to Dennison Computer Supplies, a division of Dennison Manufacturing (now Avery Dennison) and retained the computer hardware division. The EMS market was primarily students and home enthusiasts.
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Airtel announced exclusive caller pack, and a new Airtel sim card, imprinted with a still of Rajinikanth from the film. The company had also made essential requirements, to stream the audio launch and trailer, through the Airtel TV app, and also a ticket contest, was held for fans. Nippon Paint launched a new contest called "Shades of Kaala", through their official Facebook page, through which the fans can get couple passes and floppies.
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All the programmer required for basic operation was a dumb terminal, hooked up via an RS-232 serial port. Facilities were also provided for computer-based remote control via a second serial port. The early Unifamily all booted and ran from software stored on 720k floppy diskettes (in the case of the Unisite) or on 1.44MB floppies (in the case of other Unifamily members). This software consists of the operator's menu system, self-test routines and device algorithms.
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Macintosh users found trouble making SuperDisk drives work with the GCR 800 KB or 400 KB diskettes used by older Macintoshes. These disks could be used in a SuperDisk drive only if formatted to PC 720 KB MFM format. Note that almost no other USB floppy drives supported Mac GCR floppies. The biggest hurdle standing in the way of success was that Iomega's Zip drive had been out for three years when SuperDisk had been released.
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The FAT file system has been used since 1977 for computers, and it is frequently used in embedded systems. Compatible file systems make it easier to exchange data between, for example, desktop computers and portable devices. FAT file systems are the default for removable media such as floppy disks, super-floppies, memory and flash memory cards or USB flash drives. FAT is supported by portable devices such as PDAs, digital cameras, camcorders, media players, and mobile phones.
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Similar behavior is exhibited by some iron compounds, such as the ferrites and the mineral magnetite, a crystalline form of the mixed iron(II,III) oxide (although the atomic-scale mechanism, ferrimagnetism, is somewhat different). Pieces of magnetite with natural permanent magnetization (lodestones) provided the earliest compasses for navigation. Particles of magnetite were extensively used in magnetic recording media such as core memories, magnetic tapes, floppies, and disks, until they were replaced by cobalt-based materials.
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Like the System/32 and the System/3, the System/34 was primarily programmed in the RPG II language. One of the machine's interesting features was an off-line storage mechanism that utilized "" - boxes of 8-inch floppies that the machine could load and eject in a nonsequential fashion."the diskette magazine drive can process up to 23 diskettes without manual intervention. -p.11"three slots for holding individual diskettes and two slots for holding magazines of 10 individual diskettes.
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White -inch floppy disk. Floppy disks were supported on IBM's PC DOS and Microsoft's MS-DOS from their beginning on the original IBM PC. With version 1.0 of PC DOS (1981), only single-sided 160 KB floppies were supported. Version 1.1 the next year saw support expand to double-sided 320 KB disks. Finally, in 1983, DOS 2.0 supported 9 sectors per track rather than 8, providing 180 KB on a (formatted) single-sided disk and 360 KB on a double-sided.
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The original version was for 8" floppy disks and the (smaller) version for 5.25" floppies was called mini- Flex. It was also later ported to the Motorola 6809; that version was called Flex9.FAQs, FLEX User Group All versions were text-based and intended for use on display devices ranging from printing terminals like the Teletype Model 33 ASR to smart terminals. While no graphic displays were supported by TSC software, some hardware manufacturers supported elementary graphics and pointing devices.
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SCA will not harm disks per se, but spreads to any write-enabled floppies inserted. If they use custom bootblocks (such as games), they are rendered unusable. SCA also checksums as an original filesystem (OFS) bootblock, hence destroying newer filesystems if the user doesn't know the proper use of the "install" command to remove SCA ("install df0: FFS FORCE" to recover a 'fast filesystem' floppy). The "Mega-Mighty SCA" produced the first Amiga virus checker which killed the SCA virus.
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The monitor could also display graphics well enough for the bundled graphics program and for some games. 3-inch drive common on Amstrad machines The floppy disk drives on these models were in the unusual 3-inch "compact floppy" format, which was selected as it had a simpler electrical interface than 3½-inch drives. In the range's early days supplies of 3-inch floppies occasionally ran out, but by 1988 the PCW's popularity encouraged suppliers to compete for this market.
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System 7.0 was the last version of the Macintosh operating system that was available for no charge and could be freely redistributed. Although System 7 could be purchased from Apple, the cost was nominal and considered to only cover duplication and media. It was common for Macintosh dealers to allow customers to use the store's demo machines to copy System 7 install disks for the cost of a box of floppies. CD-ROM magazines such as Nautilus included System 7 on their disks.
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Happy drives are series of disk drive enhancements for the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST computer families produced by a small company Happy Computers. Happy Computers is most noted for the add-in boards for the Atari 810 and Atari 1050 disk drives, which achieved a tremendous speed improvement for reading and writing, and for the ability to "back up" floppies. Happy's products were among the most popular Atari computer add-ons. They were still in use and active in the aftermarket as of 2009.faqs.
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External storage units were available for the 405x series computers. The 4924 was an external version of the internal DC300 tape drive. The 4907 used single or dual Shugart 851R 8-inch floppy drives with 64 KB floppies and the larger, 2-drawer filing cabinet sized, 4909 storage unit used a CDC 96 megabyte hard drive with the first 16 megabytes in the form of a removable disc-pack. Two sizes of the 4956 graphics tablet offered a slow process for inputing from paper drawings.
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There are several ways to install a Linux distribution. Nowadays, the most common method of installing Linux is by booting from a live USB memory stick, which can be created by using a USB image writer application and the ISO image, which can be downloaded from the various Linux distribution websites. DVD disks, CD disks, network installations and even other hard drives can also be used as "installation media". Early Linux distributions were installed using sets of floppies but this has been abandoned by all major distributions.
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Nowadays most distributions offer CD and DVD sets with the vital packages on the first disc and less important packages on later ones. They usually also allow installation over a network after booting from either a set of floppies or a CD with only a small amount of data on it. New users tend to begin by partitioning a hard drive in order to keep their previously installed operating system. The Linux distribution can then be installed on its own separate partition without affecting previously saved data.
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Digital art such as moving images, multimedia, interactive programs, and computer-generated art has different properties than physical artwork such as oil paintings and sculptures. Unlike analog technologies, a digital file can be recopied onto a new medium without any deterioration of content. One of the problems with preserving digital art is that the formats continuously change over time. Former examples of transitions include that from 8-inch floppy disks to 5.25-inch floppies, 3-inch diskettes to CD-ROMs, and DVDs to flash drives.
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However, more sophisticated work environments of the time required separate disks for documents and the system installation. Due to the memory constraints (128 KB) of the original Macintosh, and the fact that the floppies could hold 400 KB, users frequently had to swap disks in and out of the floppy drive. For this reason, external floppy drives were frequently used. The Macintosh External Disk Drive (mechanically identical to the internal one, piggybacking on the same controller) was a popular add-on at US$495.
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In 2003 - 2004, Dawson and Radtke self-published issues 4-6 as traditional "floppy" comics printed at proper-comics-printer Quebecor graphics. Hubris prompted the boys to overprint issue 4, a mistake that they, their wives, and their storage spaces, still regret today. With issues 5 and 6 a more manageable print run was decided upon, and sales were healthy. The floppies were picked up by the comics-distribution monopoly Diamond, as well as by other struggling competitors like Cold-Cut and Shenton 4 Sales.
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However IBM made available optional external 5.25" drives, with internal adapters for the early PS/2 models, to enable data transfer. 3.5" DD and HD floppies In the initial lineup, IBM used 720 KB double density (DD) capacity drives on the 8086-based models and 1440 KB high density (HD) on the 80286-based and higher models. By the end of the PS/2 line they had moved to a somewhat standardized capacity of 2880 KB. The PS/2 floppy drives lacked a capacity detector.
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These products are partly produced in Verbatim and Mitsubishi's own plants in Singapore and Japan, and partly under license by Taiwanese and Indian manufacturers. Their early floppies were manufactured at a factory in Limerick, Republic of Ireland, starting 1979. Verbatim also resells relabeled products from Japanese, Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, Malaysian and Indian factories (Pearl White DVD series in Europe, some CD-R not labeled Super Azo), including but not limited to products by Taiyo Yuden, Ritek Corporation, CMC Magnetics, Prodisc, Moser Baer, Daxon/BenQ.
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His first record appearances were as a member of the hip hop duo Emanon with the rapper Aloe Blacc. They released various mixtapes beginning in 1995 with "Stretch Marx" before releasing their first album, Anon & On. After 2002, Exile went on to release one more Emanon album, The Waiting Room (2005), a solo album, Dirty Science (2006), and another collaborative effort with the rapper Blu, Below the Heavens (2007). Exile released two more solo albums, Radio in 2009 and 4TRK Mind in 2011. 2013 saw the release of his instrumental album, Zip Disks & Floppies.
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When unpacking/decrunching, the applications do not need to know which library was used to pack or crunch the data. XPK is a wrapper for crunchers; to decrunch non-XPK packed formats requires XFD. Another important invention on the Amiga platform was the ADF format for creating images of Amiga floppy disks, either standard AmigaDOS floppies or non-DOS ("NDOS") ones, for use in Amiga emulators, such as WinUAE. Amiga emulators and AmigaOS (with third-party software) can use these files as if they were virtual floppy disks.
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Unlimited virtual floppies could be created on modern Amigas, although WinUAE on a real PC can handle only four at a time, the maximum number of floppy drives that the Amiga hardware could have connected at any one time. All the popular Amiga compression implementations and archive files are now centralized and implemented by a single system library called XAD, which has a front-end GUI named Voodoo-X. It is included in AmigaOS 3.9 and up with UnArc. This library is modular and can handle more than 80 compression formats.
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Before computer networks became widespread, most viruses spread on removable media, particularly floppy disks. In the early days of the personal computer, many users regularly exchanged information and programs on floppies. Some viruses spread by infecting programs stored on these disks, while others installed themselves into the disk boot sector, ensuring that they would be run when the user booted the computer from the disk, usually inadvertently. Personal computers of the era would attempt to boot first from a floppy if one had been left in the drive.
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The Mimic Systems "Mimic Spartan Apple II+ compatibility box" enabled C64 users to run Apple II+ software. It came with the "DOS Card" addition, an Apple II disk controller that was installed inside the Commodore 1541 disk drive, between the floppy logic board and the drive mechanism. In normal mode the circuit simply passed signals through but at the flick of a switch it could take over the mechanism and turn the drive into an Apple II drive. The potential for grave damage to both Apple II and 1541 floppies was enormous and often happened.
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W ABC was a program that converted files from Luxor ABC 80 and ABC 800 to PC compatible computers. The program read and wrote ABC-floppies in the PC's diskette compartment. Besides pure file transfer some special file formats were converted. For example, ORD800-files (wordprocessing on ABC 800) could be translated to WordPerfect, Microsoft Word or Cicero files (Cicero was a word processor related to ORD800) while Kalkyl800-files were translated to something that could be read by Lotus 1-2-3 or the Microsoft Excel forerunner MultiPlan.
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The first version of the TU58 imposed very severe timing constraints on the unbuffered UARTs then being used by Digital, but a later firmware revision eased the flow-control problems. The RT11 single-user operating system can be bootstrapped from a TU58, but the relatively slow access time of the tape drive makes use of the system challenging to an impatient user. Like its predecessor DECtape, and like the faster RX01 floppies used on the VAX-11/780, a DECtape II cartridge has a capacity of about 256 kilobytes.
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We have a list of all the problems we currently have at the low end. The serial port, we can't read high density floppies, there isn't enough band width to do 72 Hz screens plus there are no chunky pixel modes for rendering. We listed all those and said, "OK let's go out and fix them as quickly as we can", so AA+ is an extension, not radically new architecture. We're doing the best that we can, taking advantage of advances in technology, significantly reducing the cost and that's the goal.
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This would double the transfer speed because the bits would be passing under the head twice as fast. Early floppy disk interfaces were designed for 250 kbit/s transfer speeds, but were rapidly outperformed with the introduction of the "high density" 1.44 MB (1,440 KiB) floppies in the 1980s. The vast majority of PCs included interfaces designed for high density drives that ran at 500 kbit/s instead. These, too, were completely overwhelmed by newer devices like the LS-120, which were forced to use higher-speed interfaces such as IDE.
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Note however that the `/U` switch only works reliably with floppy diskettes (see image to the right). Technically because unless `/Q` is used, floppies are always low level formatted in addition to high-level formatted. Under certain circumstances with hard drive partitions, however, the `/U` switch merely prevents the creation of `unformat` information in the partition to be formatted while otherwise leaving the partition's contents entirely intact (still on disk but marked deleted). In such cases, the user's data remain ripe for recovery with specialist tools such as EnCase or disk editors.
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The computer was widely imitated as several other computer companies began offering low-priced portable computers with bundled software. The Osborne's popularity was surpassed by the similar Kaypro II which has a larger, CRT that can display 80 characters on 24 lines, and double density floppies that can store twice as much data. Osborne Computer Corporation was unable to effectively respond to Kaypro until after 8-bit, CP/M-based computers were obsolete. In 1981, IBM released the 16-bit IBM PC which is significantly more powerful and expandable.
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System 7.1 is mainly a bugfix release, with a few minor features added. One of the major new features of System 7.1 was moving fonts out of the System file into the Fonts folder in the System Folder. Previously a resource-copying utility such as ResEdit or Font D/A Mover was required for installing fonts. System 7.1 is not only the first Macintosh operating system to cost money (all previous versions were free or sold at the cost of the floppies), but also received a "Pro" sibling (version 7.1.
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PCTask is a software PC emulator emulating PC Intel hardware with 8088 processor and CGA graphic modes. The latest version of it (4.4) was capable to emulate an 80386 clocked at 12 MHz and features include support for up to 16 MiB RAM (15 MB extended) under MS-DOS, up to two floppy drives and 2 hard drives. The emulator could make use of hardfile devices and then it could handle multiple hard disk files and hard disk partitions. It supported high Density floppies and CD-ROM if the Amiga hardware had mounted those devices.
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Superformatting is the process of formatting a floppy disk at a capacity that the disk is not designed for. It can ruin a floppy disk, but it is used in some floppy-based Linux distros to increase the room for applications and utilities. muLinux is a notable example of this technique. Another common use (which is not as popular nowadays) was to format low-density 3½-inch or 5¼-inch floppies as high-density, or in the case of 3.5-inch disks, even extra-high density (HD-36).
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Older models of computers, electronic keyboards and industrial automation often used floppy disk drives for data transfer. Older equipment may be difficult to replace or upgrade because of cost, requirement for continuous availability or unavailable upgrades. Proper operation may require operating system, software and data to be read and written from and to floppies, forcing users to maintain floppy drives on supporting systems. Floppy disks and floppy drives are gradually going out of production, and replacement of malfunctioning drives, and the systems hosting them, is becoming increasingly difficult.
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Floppy disks for the IBM PC and compatibles quickly standardized on 512-byte sectors, so two sectors were easily referred to as "1K". The 3.5-inch "360 KB" and "720 KB" had 720 (single-sided) and 1440 sectors (double-sided) respectively. When the High Density "1.44 MB" floppies came along, with 2880 of these 512-byte sectors, that terminology represented a hybrid binary- decimal definition of "1 MB" = 210 × 103 = 1 024 000 bytes. In contrast, hard disk drive manufacturers used megabytes or MB, meaning 106 bytes, to characterize their products as early as 1974.
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However, not all reception was negative; the multitasking capabilities of the operating system were rated positively, especially compared to Windows 3.1. Compared to the size of the operating system, the installation turned out to be very easy, even though installing from floppies was a very time-consuming task. The Advanced Server, intended to be the successor to the unsuccessful LAN Manager product, was technically much superior to its predecessor, and only failed to gain success because it shared the same problems with its workstation pendant, such as the low performance running 16-bit applications.
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By using a dedicated sound engine in addition to the main processor, sound generation and disk I/O were handled separately. This allowed so-called load-while-play, a feature quite unique at the time. The user could boot the EPS and load some sounds while playing the ones that are already loaded. Then sample in a new sound, only to find that you're out of floppies to save your new sample to — the EPS OS will allow you to go ahead, format another floppy disk, and save your new sound without the system function getting in the way of playing the audio.
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According to contemporary reports, the virus was rather contagious, successfully infecting the floppies of most people Skrenta knew, and upsetting many of them. Part of the "success", of course, was that people were not at all wary of the potential problem, nor were virus scanners or cleaners available. The virus could be removed using Apple's MASTER CREATE utility or other utilities to re-write a fresh copy of DOS to the infected disk. Furthermore, once Elk Cloner was removed, the previously-infected disk would not be re-infected since it already contained the Elk Cloner "signature" in its directory.
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This common consent ended with release of version 2.0 of AmigaOS, which re-introduced proper names to the installation floppies of AmigaDOS, Workbench, Extras, etc. Starting with Workbench 1.0, AmigaOS treated the Workbench as a backdrop, borderless window sitting atop a blank screen. With the introduction of AmigaOS 2.0, however, the user was free to select whether the main Workbench window appeared as a normally layered window, complete with a border and scrollbars, through a menu item. Amiga users were able to boot their computer into a command-line interface (also known as the CLI or Amiga Shell).
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Disk editors for home computers of the 1980s were often included as part of utility software packages on floppies or cartridges. The latter had the advantage of being instantly available at power-on and after resets, instead of having to be loaded or reloaded on the same disk drive that later would hold the floppy to be edited (the majority of home computer users possessed only one floppy disk drive at that time). Having the disk editor on cartridge also helped the user avoid editing/damaging the disk editor application disk by mistake. All disk editors strive to be better than `DEBUG` contained in all DOS versions.
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In 1991, Insite Peripherals introduced the "Floptical", which uses an infra-red LED to position the heads over marks in the disk surface. The original drive stores 21 MB, while also reading and writing standard DD and HD floppies. In order to improve data transfer speeds and make the high-capacity drive usefully quick as well, the drives are attached to the system using a SCSI connector instead of the normal floppy controller. This makes them appear to the operating system as a hard drive instead of a floppy, meaning that most PCs are unable to boot from them (because they aren't close enough in structure to bootable hard disks either).
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In 1994, Iomega introduced the Zip drive. Although neither size (the original or the later Pocket Zip drive) conforms to the 3½-inch form factor and hence is not compatible with standard 1.44 MB drives, the original physical size still became the most popular of the "super floppies". The first version boasted 100 MB; later versions boasted 250 MB and then 750 MB of storage, until the PocketZip (formerly known as Clik!) was developed with 40 MB. Though Zip drives gained in popularity for several years they never reached the same market penetration as standard floppy drives, since only some new computers were sold with the drives.
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It was also able to read and write to standard floppy disks about 5 times as fast as standard floppy drives. It was upgraded (as the "LS-240") to 240 MB (240.75 MB). Not only can the drive read and write 1440 kB disks, but the last versions of the drives can write 32 MB onto a normal 1440 kB disk. Unfortunately, popular opinion held the Super Disks to be quite unreliable, though no more so than the Zip drives and SyQuest Technology offerings of the same period and there were also many reported problems moving standard floppies between LS-120 drives and normal floppy drives.
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IBM 5360 System Unit IBM 5362 System Unit The IBM System/36 (often abbreviated as S/36) was a small computer system marketed by IBM from 1983 to 2000 - a multi-user, multi-tasking successor to the System/34. Like the System/34 and the older System/32, the System/36 was primarily programmed in the RPG II language. One of the machine's optional features was an off-line storage mechanism (on the 5360 model) that utilized "magazines" – boxes of 8-inch floppies that the machine could load and eject in a nonsequential fashion. The System/36 also had many mainframe features such as programmable job queues and scheduling priority levels.
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The TS suffered from limitations including the non-resonant digital filter, or the proprietary format used for floppies, which was incompatible with anything else. This prevented Standard MIDI Files to be read by the machine, and the strange track arrangement of the sequencer limited the MIDI multitimbral parts of the TS to 12 instead of the standard 16. The vacuum fluorescent display, although unique and very easy to read, was prone to malfunction after much time of use and very hard to replace or repair. Even Ensoniq acknowledged this problem by creating a variant called the TS-10 Plus, which used a conventional LCD display instead of the vacuum one.
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Otherwise, UniFLEX was very similar to Unix Version 7, though some command names were slightly different. There was no technical reason for the renaming apart from achieving some level of command-level compatibility with its single-user sibling FLEX. By simply restoring the Unix style names, a considerable degree of "Unix Look & Feel" could be established, though due to memory limitations the command line interpreter (shell) was less capable than the Bourne Shell known from Unix Version 7. Memory management included swapping to a dedicated portion of the system disk (even on floppies) but only whole processes could be swapped in and out, not individual pages.
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Mark Pierce was based in San Francisco with his own company MacroMind, while Jon Gay and the rest of the Silicon Beach team were in San Diego; so after an initial launch meeting, most of the collaboration between Pierce and Gay was handled remotely. Pierce designed the animations in MacroMind's "VideoWorks" (the direct ancestor of Adobe Director) and then mailed the files on floppies to Gay, who then coded the game in 68000 Assembly Language on an Apple Lisa (a few parts like the high-score system were written in Pascal). The digitized sound was created by Eric Zocher who worked with voice actor Dick Noel.
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Since the shareware versions were essentially free, the cost needed only the covering of the disk and minimal packaging. Sometimes, the demo disks were packaged within the box of another game by the same company. As the increasing size of games in the mid-90s made them impractical to fit on floppies, and retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice, shareware games were replaced by shorter demos that were either distributed free on CDs with gaming magazines or as free downloads over the Internet, in some cases becoming exclusive content for specific websites. Shareware was also the distribution method of choice of early modern first-person shooters (FPS) like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
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With the correct filesystem driver, an Amiga can theoretically read any arbitrary format on the 3½-inch floppy, including those recorded at a slightly different rotation rate. On the PC, however, there is no way to read an Amiga disk without special hardware, such as a CatWeasel, and a second floppy drive. Commodore never upgraded the Amiga chip set to support high- density floppies, but sold a custom drive (made by Chinon) that spins at half speed (150 RPM) when a high-density floppy was inserted, enabling the existing floppy controller to be used. This drive was built into the Amiga 3000, although the later Amiga 1200 was only fitted with the standard DD drive.
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It was a disk-based operating system, using 256-byte sectors on soft-sectored floppies; the disk structure used linkage bytes in each sector to indicate the next sector in a file or free list. The directory structure was much simplified as a result. TSC (and others) provided several programming languages including BASIC in two flavors (standard and extended) and a tokenizing version of extended BASIC called Pre-compiled BASIC, FORTH, C, FORTRAN, and PASCAL. TSC also wrote a version of FLEX, Smoke Signal DOS, for the California hardware manufacturer Smoke Signal Broadcasting; this version used forward and back linkage bytes in each sector which increased disk reliability at the expense of compatibility and speed.
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Spellbinder, from Lexisoft, was a powerful word processor which was highly configurable and even had a built-in programming language for automating tasks. Eagle computers came with a version of Spellbinder already configured, with many functions already assigned to keys (the keys had labels on their fronts to show their Spellbinder functions). The only configuration needed, then, was to set it up for a given printer; and for most printers, that just meant choosing the printer off a list. The combination of Spellbinder software, the Eagle keyboard, and the large storage capacity of Eagle floppies, made a word-processing machine so powerful for its day that many Eagle owners never realized how much more their computers were capable of.
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In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use. Then, distribution of larger packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs and online distribution. An attempt to enhance the existing -inch designs was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, utilizing very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 MB and backward- compatibility with standard -inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy-disk products, although ultimately recordable CDs/DVDs, solid-state flash storage, and eventually online storage would render all these removable disk formats obsolete. External USB-based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives.
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A commercially-made floppy disk "notcher"Manufacturers sold both single-sided and double-sided disks with the double-sided disks being typically 50% more expensive than single-sided disks. While the magnetic-coated medium was coated on both sides, the single- sided floppies had a read-write notch on only one side, thus allowing only one side of the disk to be used. When users discovered this, they began buying the less-expensive single-sided disks and "notching" them using scissors, a hole punch, or a specially-designed "notcher" to allow them to write to the reverse side of the disk. DVDs also are available in single-sided and double-sided formats, often as an alternative to two-disc packages.
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Later in production, an option for installation of a miniature hard drive was provided (See MSM, or Mass Storage Module, below). The Unisite is the only programmer that still requires true 720k floppies for non-MSM operation, or updating the MSM's software without the aid of external PC-based software. The Unisite was the flagship model of the Unifamily line, selling for over $35,000 in a typical configuration and staying in active production for at least 20 years. Data I/O, in an effort to make the Unifamily line more attractive to companies with tighter budgets, introduced several other programmers utilizing the same pin-driver technology as the Unisite, all selling for (typically) under $10,000. These included the model 2900, 3900, 3980, and 3980XPi.
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The DSS-1 has its operating system stored on ROM chips, so if you lose your floppy disks you can still boot the system up (unlike the E-mu Emulator, Ensoniq Mirage, and early Roland samplers which required you always have a floppy disk containing the OS). However, each time you boot up the DSS-1 you will not have any sounds available until you load a system into memory from floppy disk. This can usually take anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds, depending on the size and number of multisamples contained in that system. The floppies that the DSS-1 understands are the older DSDD (double- sided double-density) disks that were also used on the Ensoniq Mirage and on early Macintosh computers.
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The Aster used 64KB of RAM memory and had the unique feature of supporting two fundamentally different internal architectures: when turned on without a boot floppy or with a TRS-DOS floppy, the Aster would be fully TRS-80 compatible, with 48KB or RAM. When the boot loader detected a CP/M floppy, the Aster would reconfigure its internal memory architecture on the fly to optimally support CP/M with 60 KB free RAM for programs (TPA) and an 80 x 25 display. This dual-architecture capability only existed on one other TRS-80 clone, the LOBO Max-80. With a special configuration tool, the CT-80 could reconfigure its floppy drivers to read and write the floppies of about 80 other CP/M systems.
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Interesting fact is that the program could make a copy of itself, BUT could not make a copy of the copy because the sync length of the original was shorter than the copy made and the loader checked for this length and the copy would have a much longer sync. V3 was later released to PD by the author. NIBtools is a modern (circa 2006) open source software that performs the same function, intended mainly for archiving data from old floppies that may be copyright-protected or damaged. Instead of reading bit-by-bit, one can also read many 1.25 KB stretches and then assemble them together in a way akin to shotgun sequencing, an approach necessary for using slow connections on the Commodore 1541.
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Many people compared the HiFD to Sony's Betamax videotape format. However, while the failure of Betamax is often blamed on poor management, it is generally thought that HiFD would ultimately have failed no matter what Sony did – CD-R(W) had a built-in advantage with the large number of CD-ROM (reader) drives in computers (even taking into account the fact that not all CD drives could read CD-Rs and that most, early on, could not read CD-RWs), and its higher capacity. The fact that ultimately SuperDisk (even as LS-240, which could read and write 240MB and 120MB media, supported 1.44MB HD floppies and could format them up to 30MB) did not survive either is seen as the greatest support for this theory.
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As the increasing size of games in the mid-1990s made them impractical to fit on floppies, and retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice, shareware games were replaced by shorter game demos (often only one or two levels), distributed free on CDs with gaming magazines and over the Internet. Real-time strategy became a popular genre of computer games in the early 90s, with Dune II setting the standard game mechanics of many games since. Meanwhile, Alone in the Dark influenced the survival-horror genre with its action-adventure elements. It established the formula that later flourished on CD-ROM–based consoles, with games such as Resident Evil, which coined the name "survival horror" and popularized the genre, and Silent Hill.
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Sony introduced its own floptical-like system in 1997 as the "150 MB Sony HiFD" which was originally supposed to hold 150 MB (157.3 decimal megabytes) of data. Although by this time the LS-120 had already garnered some market penetration, industry observers nevertheless confidently predicted the HiFD would be the real standard-floppy-killer and finally replace standard floppies in all machines. After only a short time on the market the product was pulled, as it was discovered there were a number of performance- and reliability problems that made the system essentially unusable. Sony then reengineered the device for a quick rerelease, but then extended the delay well into 1998 instead, and increased the capacity to "200 MB" (approximately 210 decimal megabytes) while they were at it.
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ProDOS retains the 16-sector low- level format of DOS 3.3 for 5.25 inch disks, but introduces a new high-level format that is suitable for devices of up to 32 MB; this makes it suitable for hard disks from that era and 3.5-inch floppies. All the Apple computers from the II Plus onward can run both DOS 3.3 and ProDOS, the Plus requiring a "Language Card" memory expansion to use ProDOS; the e and later models have built-in Language Card hardware, and so can run ProDOS straight. ProDOS includes software to copy files from Apple DOS disks. However, many people who had no need for the improvements of ProDOS (and who did not like its much higher memory footprint) continued using Apple DOS or one of its clones long after 1983.
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Although very similar to the 400-kilobyte drive which newly replaced Apple's ill-fated Twiggy drive in the Lisa, there were subtle differences relating mainly to the eject mechanism. However, confusingly all of these drives were labelled identically. The Macintosh could only support one external drive, limiting the number of floppy disks mounted at once to two, but both Apple and third party manufacturers developed external hard drives that connected to the Mac's floppy disk port, which had pass-through ports to accommodate daisy-chaining the external disk drive. Apple's Hard Disk 20 could accommodate an additional daisy-chained hard drive as well as an external floppy disk. 3.5-inch single- sided floppies had been used on several microcomputers and synthesizers in the early 1980s, including the Hewlett Packard 150 and various MSX computers.
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This machine was designed at the University of Waterloo for teaching programming. In addition to the basic CBM 8000 hardware, the 9000 added a second CPU in the form of the Motorola 6809, more RAM and included a number of programming languages including a BASIC in ROM for the 6502 and a separate ANSI Minimal BASIC- compatible BASIC for the 6809, along with APL, COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal and a 6809 assembler on floppies. It also included microEDITOR, a text editor for use in writing and maintaining programs for any of the 6809 languages. Also included was a terminal program which allowed the machine to be used as a "smart terminal" as well, so this single machine could replace many of the boxes currently in use at the university.
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DEC "Fonz-11" (F11) Chipset The PRO-325 and -350 used the F-11 chipset (as used in LSI-11/23 systems) to create a single-board PDP-11 with up to six expansion slots of a proprietary CTI (Computing Terminal Interconnect) bus using 90-pin ZIF connectors. The PRO family used dual RX50 floppy drives for storage; the PRO-325 had only floppies, and the 350 and 380 also included an internal hard drive. Mainline PDP-11s generally used separate serial terminals as console and display devices; the PRO family used in-built bit-mapped graphics to drive a combined console and display. All other I/O devices in the PRO family were also different (in most cases, radically different) from their counterparts on other PDP-11 models.
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Atari initially used single-sided 3.5 inch disk drives that could store up to 360 kB. Later drives were double-sided and stored 720 kB. Some commercial software, particularly games, shipped by default on single-sided disks, even supplying two 360kB floppies instead of a single double-sided one, for fear of alienating early adopters. Another sticking point with the ST's floppy drives was that, whilst double-sided drive equipped STs could happily read discs formatted under MS-DOS on IBM PCs, PCs could not themselves read Atari disks, because the initial versions of TOS could recognise, read, and write to but not themselves create discs in the same particular specification used and indeed demanded by MS-DOS because of differences in the layout of data on track 0.
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The only difference between an Eagle I and an Eagle II, for instance, was the number of floppy-disk drives. By adding the right drives, and a hard disk, SASI card, and extra power supply, a I could be upgraded to a II, III, IV, or V; a III could become a IV or V; a IV could become a V. When half-height floppy-disk drives and hard disks became available, Eagle drives that had worn out could be replaced with ones that took up less space and drew less power. The Eagle BIOS supported up to two double-sided floppy-disk drives and up to four 8 MB hard-disk partitions. Systems could be built with two half-height floppies and a 10, 20, or 32 MB hard disk.
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In the Atari 8bit version of Ultima IV one of the floppy disks had an unformatted track. In its absence the player would lose on every fight, which would not be obvious as a copy protection effect right away as one could assume that this was just due to either lack of experience or proper equipment. The protection mechanism was subtle enough to be overlooked by the German distributor which originally delivered Atari 8bit packages with floppies that were formatted regularly, and thus these paid copies acted like unlicensed copies, causing players to lose every battle.The Official Book of Ultima by Shay Addams In Ultima V, there were one or two instances where ostensibly insignificant information found in the accompanying booklet were asked by person(s) encountered in the game.
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A Video Floppy is an analog recording storage medium in the form of a 2-inch magnetic floppy disk used to store still frames of composite analog video. A video floppy, also known as a VF disk, could store up to 25 frames either in the NTSC or PAL video standards, with each frame containing 2 fields of interlaced video. The video floppy also could store 50 frames of video, with each frame of video only containing one field of video information, recorded or played back in a "skip-field" fashion. Video floppies were first developed by Sony and introduced under the "Mavipak" name in 1981 for their Mavica still video camera (not to be confused with their later line of Mavica digital cameras introduced in the mid-1990s, which stored JPEG images to standard 3.5-inch floppy disks readable by computers instead).
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Although not technically a clone, Quadram produced an add-in ISA card, called the Quadlink, that provided hardware emulation of an Apple II+ for the IBM PC. The card had its own 6502 CPU and dedicated 80 K RAM (64 K for applications, plus 16 K to hold a reverse-engineered Apple ROM image, loaded at boot-time), and installed "between" the PC and its floppy drive(s), color display, and speaker, in a pass-through configuration. This allowed the PC to operate in a dual-boot fashion: when booted through the Quadlink, the PC could run the majority of Apple II software, and read and write Apple-formatted floppies through the standard PC floppy drive. Because it had a dedicated processor, rather than any form of software emulation, this system ran at nearly the same speed as an equivalent Apple machine.
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While Model I DOS is fairly flexible in its capabilities, Model III DOS is hard coded to only support 180K single sided floppies, a problem fixed by the many third party DOSes. To that end, when Radio Shack introduced hard disks for the TRS-80 line in 1982, the company licensed LDOS rather than attempt to modify Model III DOS for hard disk support. Level II BASIC on the Model III is 16K in size and incorporates a few features from Level I Disk BASIC TRSDOS 1.3 was given a few more minor updates, the last being in 1984, although the version number was unchanged. This includes at least one update that writes an Easter Egg message "Joe, you rummy buzzard" on an unused disk sector, which is reputedly a joke message left by a programmer in a beta version, but accidentally included in the production master.
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Once the 1771 delay was implemented, it is fairly reliable. In 1981, Steve Ciarcia published in BYTE the design for a homemade, improved expansion interface with additional RAM and a disk controller for the TRS-80. A data separator and a double density disk controller (based on the WD 1791 chip) were made by Percom (a Texas peripheral vendor), LNW, Tandy and others. The Percom Doubler adds the ability to boot and use Double Density floppies using a Percom-modified TRSDOS called DoubleDOS. The LNDoubler adds the ability to read and write from 5¼" diskette drives for a total of 1.2 MB storage. Near the end of the Model I's lifespan in 1982, upgrades were offered to replace its original controller with a double density one. The first disk drives offered on the Model I were Shugart SA-400s which supported 35 tracks and was the sole 5.25" drive on the market in 1977-78. By 1979, other manufacturers began offering drives.
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The whole concept of The Charts was an idea of Zae who wanted the group to become well-known very fast. His idea was simple: The English group The Lost Boys was in the process of creating the first issue of what will become one of the most successful disk magazines on Atari: Maggie. Considering that The Lost Boys were one of the most talented active groups, it was probably a good idea to "jump the bandwagon", and participate in the creation of this disk magazine; doing the charts was a simple way to achieve this goal. Six charts were produced in total, but they can hardly be linked to individual issues of Maggie: Production delays were extremely fluctuant on NeXT side, due first to the fact that the group was spread all around France, exchanging data using floppies sent my mail, and second because NeXT had to communicate with The Lost Boys over the channel also using postal mail.
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An innovative alternative was the Exatron Stringy Floppy, a continuous loop tape drive which was much faster than a datacassette drive and could perform much like a floppy disk drive. It was available for the TRS-80 and some others. A closely related technology was the ZX Microdrive developed by Sinclair Research in the UK for their ZX Spectrum and QL home computers. Eventually mass production of 5.25" drives resulted in lower prices, and after about 1984 they pushed cassette drives out of the US home computer market. 5.25" floppy disk drives would remain standard until the end of the 8-bit era. Though external 3.5" drives were made available for home computer systems toward the latter part of the 1980s, almost all software sold for 8-bit home computers remained on 5.25" disks; 3.5" drives were used for data storage, with the exception of the Japanese MSX standard, on which 5.25" floppies were never popular.
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One striking difference between it and other machines on the market at the time was the fact that the disc spun at different speeds according to where the data was stored, running slower towards the outer edge of the disc in such a way that bit density (bits per cm passing the head), rather than rotational speed, was approximately constant. This, combined with group-coded recording (GCR), allowed standard floppy disks to hold more data than others at the time, 600 KB on single- and 1.2 MB on double-sided floppies compared with 140–160 KB per side of other machines such as the Apple II and early IBM PC, but disks made at constant bit density were not compatible with machines with standard drives. The Victor 9000's 800x400 resolution screen, 896 KB of memory (RAM), programmable keyboard and character set were also far ahead of the competition. While unsuccessful in North America, Victor 9000 became the most popular 16-bit business computer in Europe, especially those in Britain and Germany, while IBM delayed the release of the PC there.
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UniFLEX is a Unix-like operating system developed by Technical Systems Consultants (TSC) for the Motorola 6809 family which allowed multitasking and multiprocessing. It was released for DMA-capable 8" floppy, extended memory addressing hardware (software controlled 4KiB paging of up to 768 KiB RAM SWTPC S/09 Dynamic Address Translation), Motorola 6809 based computers. Examples included machines from SWTPC, GIMIX and Goupil (France). On SWTPC machines, UniFLEX also supported a 20 MB, 14" hard drive (OEM'd from Century Data Systems) in 1979. Later on, it also supported larger 14" drives (up to 80 MB), 8" hard drives, and 5-1/4" floppies. In 1982 other machines also supported the first widely available 5-1/4" hard disks using the ST506 interface such as the 5 MB BASF 6182 and the removable SyQuest SQ306RD of the same capacity. Due to the limited address space of the 6809 (64 kB) and hardware limitations, the main memory space for the UniFLEX kernel as well as for any running process had to be smaller than 56 kB (code + data)(processes could be up to 64K minus 512 bytes). This was achieved by writing the kernel and most user space code entirely in assembly language, and by removing a few classic Unix features, such as group permissions for files.
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