Subj : Re: Big nostalgia hits
To   : Bob Worm
From : Spectre
Date : Tue Nov 21 2023 18:34:00

 BW> I vaguely remember in Woz's book he said that floppy controllers were
 BW> phenomenally expensive, to the point where it put them out of reach for
 BW> home applications, so he knocked something together from shift registers
 BW> and whatever else could be obtained at a good price.

 BW> While that meant more work for the host it "freed" everyone from the rigid
 BW> notion of tracks and sectors. You could send the head wherever you liked
 BW> while it was reading and writing, with spiral writing being one common way
 BW> to do it. Apparently spiral written disks sound nice, but I've never heard
 BW> it myself.

All true... Woz seemed to be a bit like that, make the most of what you've
got and software the rest.  Spiral tracks and half tracks were pretty common
in copy protection methods.  But both were pretty short lived in
effectiveness.  If'n I recall right there might have been the odd reversed
track sequence, where 0 is still at the outside to boot and everthing else is
backwards.  Most drives, at least the original Disk ]['s could also cope with
more than 24 tracks, patch the DOS to allow more some would do 25/6 out of
box otherwise you could wind in the stop and get a few extra tracks.

Spec


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