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:

  1. allen (in Michigan)6:18 PM

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

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  2. 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.

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  3. Oromin7:04 PM

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

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  4. Anonymous7:29 PM

    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.

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  5. pseudotsuga9:17 PM

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

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

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  7. Anonymous6:14 AM

    1.44 megabytes

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  8. Anonymous10:15 AM

    1.44 MB

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  9. 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 :)

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  10. Anonymous12:59 PM

    1.44 MB

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  11. 744kb, hd 1.44 mb

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