Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Wednesday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Autoexec.bat. .bat meant it was a “batch” file, executing several commands in succession.

Today's question is:
3.5” floppy disks held how much data on a PC?

14 comments:

Steve USMA '85 said...

1.44 MB

allen (in Michigan) said...

1.44 megabytes. Seems an impossibly small amount of data now.

Fritz J. said...

Not sure what answer you're after because there have been three commonly used formats for 3 1/2 inch floppies and each was capable of storing a different amount of information. If we focus on what most people consider the early version, 720 kilobytes, but two later versions held considerably more. As I recall, the next generation held 1440 kilobytes, and the third held 2880 kilobytes. The two most common ones held 720 (called double density) and 1440 kilobytes but I don't remember what term was used for it. As an aside, I still have some floppies around that I ought to throw away because I no longer have a computer that will run them.

Oromin said...

44Kb. It really doesn't seem that long ago that I had one I would take to school to save my work on!

Anonymous said...

Double Sided High Density (HD) 3.5" Diskettes held 1.44MB. HD drives were standard on the IBM PS/2 (Personal Station/2, not to be confused with Sony's PlayStation2 or PS2.) Prior to that the standard 3.5" diskette was double sided, double density, which held 720KB per disk.

pseudotsuga said...

oh man...was that 500K?
It was different between Apple and Commodore and IBM PCs and TRS80s. I hope that's the right number.

Eric W. said...

1.44mb

Eric W. said...

If you want some harder questions, I could probably supply a few. :)

KauaiMark said...

1.5Mb

Anonymous said...

1.44 megabytes

Anonymous said...

1.44 MB

Joshua Sasmor said...

single-sided or double-sided? I seem to recall 360K diskettes, and then the 1.2M version once the narrow write head came info being. My Epson machine had 1.2M drives in 1989 :)

Anonymous said...

1.44 MB

Skip said...

744kb, hd 1.44 mb