User talk:Tom94022

History of the double sided floppy drive

Tom,

Here is some interesting history on the development of the double sided floppy drive.

I Googled for - shugart sa450 1976

Start reading around page 170

In the Matter of "Certain Double-Sided Floppy Disk Drives and Components Thereof"

Investigation No. 337-TA-215

USITC Publication 1860

May 1986

United States International Trade Commission, Washington DC

-- SWTPC6800 (talk) 02:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Assistance requested with ATA SSD issue

Hi, I wonder if you have a moment to give a third editor's opinion? I and editor Ramu50 are in a dispute on the AT Attachment page over whether solid state disks are supported under ATA. The issue is pretty well summarized in an [[1]] I opened at reliable sources noticeboard. Ramu50 continues to remove the reference to solid state drives from the article lede, even though there is a citation supporting it. If you have a moment I'd appreciate your opinion, either in the form of assisting to revert what I consider vandalism to AT Attachment or comments on the talk page. (Sadly, admins have taken no action on my request to revert that page's recent rename.) Jeh (talk) 07:35, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your response there. It was very helpful as it made me realize that the issue of "support" is irrelevant. Re SSD the article lede simply says that ATA is used to connect them, and this is true (there are obviously many such products on the market) whether or not they are "supported". (In fact afaik there is no actual claim of "support" for anything anywhere within the ATA/ATAPI documents; they are merely descriptive. True? Jeh (talk) 23:31, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Exactly, the specification is a description of a standard, the sellers of products assert they comport to the standard. I don't think anyone would say that NTSC supports TV's. If yr TV meets the standard it works in the US at least now, but it doesn't work in Europe (SECAM, I think) :-) Tom94022 (talk) 05:29, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Shugart or Seagate. Associates or Technology

It seems to me that the SA drives are Shugart Associates, and the ST are Seagate Technology. Was there an in-between time that was Shugart Technology?

Note that the ST506/ST412 manual in the references was published as Seagate Technology.

Gah4 (talk) 01:36, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Seagate Technology was originally named Shugart Technology. The very first ST506 drives had a Shugart Technology technical data plate. The ST412 was much later in time. The name Seagate was chosen so the ST remained the same. Go to https://www.computerhistory.org/search/ and search "Shugart Technology" if u don't believe me. Also you can look for an Al Shugart speech where he went thru the whole story. Tom94022 (talk) 20:32, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

14" HDD

See Early IBM disk storage#IBM 1311. Edward (talk) 22:21, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes I am well aware of drives having (14" and 24") disks but there never was any agreement as to size, mounting holes and connector style and location which is what I think we mean today when we talk about form factor. To the best of my knowledge no two 14" disk drives had the same size. Tom94022 (talk) 04:45, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually there was some standardizaion of form factor when 14-inch drives moved into ASME rack mounting as with Diablo cartridge and CDC SMD drives, both of which used 14-inch disks. To the best of my knowledge the 2311 and 2314 class of drives were packaged in boxes with no standardard form factor. Tom94022 (talk) 19:10, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Shugart and Conner in 1978

"With all due respect," I think you overstepped your mission in deleting almost all of the entry I edited last week declaring it "incorrect and too much information," and did so again when I rentered only my part of that entry (because I agreed the rest was TMI), but I challenge your statement that it was incorrect. In fact technically it is now incorrect, requiring a reader to view the footnote to get the true fact, which I'd say is an inconvenience at best. The fact is the company was founded as Shugart Technology and was no more than an office over a strip mall in Scotts Valley when I met there with Finis Conner in 1980 (construction for its building between the mall and the freeway broke ground shortly after I was there; I returned a few months later and saw the building complete, and by then the name was Seagate). If you think the TMI content preceding my first edit was incorrect, you should check it out before saying so - Al Shugart was an IBM employee before founding/co-founding SA and ST, and Finis, his cofounder at ST, was a former Memorex employee. If you had read the reference I inserted you would've known Al met Finis at Memorex in 1978. And any bio on Al says he left IBM in 1969. 01:33, 20 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.198.12.14 (talk)

For this chart about the current HDD companies, I think the fact that the name was originally Shugart Technology is TMI and should be in the Seagate Technology article, not here.

I did read the reference you cited and it is not a reliable source. Neither Alan Shugart nor Finis Conner were employees of Memorex in 1978. According to multiple reliable sources Shugart left Memorex to found Shugart Associates in 1973. According to multiple reliable sources Finis had left Shugart Associates in early 1978 for IMI and then with Al incorporated Shugart Technologies on Nov 1, 1978. It is not likely they ever met "at Memorex" in 1978. BTW, it is likely they first met at Memorex in 1969 (or maybe 1970) when we (Al, Finis and I) were all working together. Tom94022 (talk) 05:06, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

To sum up the above they worked together at Memorex prior to 1978 (when they met to discuss the subsequent founding of ST later that year) - they had attracted engineers from IBM to Memorex and hence to SA, thus the founders were ex-employees of both IBM and Memorex. Ergo, the entry deleted as "incorrect" was correct. 08:26, 20 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.198.12.14 (talk)

Neither Mahon nor Mitchell ever worked for IBM or Memorex; therefore the group was not "ex-IBM and ex-Memorex" or even "ex-IBM or ex-Memorex". Tom94022 (talk) 21:21, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

You're playing that old "semantics game" simply for the sake of argument. (You assume that the original entry included the word "exclusively," which it didn't, to my recollection.) 01:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.198.12.14 (talk)

No games, just trying to eliminate misleading information. Here is the original quote:

1979: Seagate Technology is founded by a group of ex-IBM and ex-Memorex personnel.

Here is the employment history of the five founders:

founder	last employer	next last	next last	next last
Shugart	unemployed	Shugart Assoc	Memorex	IBM
Conner	IMI	Shugart Assoc	Memorex
Iftikar	Memorex
Mahon	Shugart Assoc	Diablo	Xerox
Mitchell	Commodore	Bendix	Fairchild

IMO I don't see how this group can accurately be described as "ex-IBM and ex-Memorex", particularly since only one person had worked at IBM, 10 years and 3 jobs previously. It also is TMI, so I took it out. Tom94022 (talk) 00:15, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the info - it seems to me you've proven the essential veracity of the TMI content with 60% of the founders (including both of the major players) meeting at least one of the dual criteria. I suspect the original author thought of the former colleagues of those 3, who brought their expertise from Memorex and IBM to SA and hence to ST, as part of the "groups," making it even more valid, despite the decade elapsed. (Remember that I have agreed that it was TMI for this section but it wasn't incorrect in that the word "exclusively" was not used - thus it becomes simply a matter of semantics.) 74.198.12.14 (talk) 01:05, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Low level formatting and stepper-servo

Buh? Why did you remove all the material on steppers and servos from the LLF article? None of that material is "specific to the IBM PC" as you commented at the time but was used by everyone in the industry across all manufacturers. The whole LLF section is basically devoid of content without those sections. As such I am in the process of reverting/restoring your content removal in July. DMahalko (talk) 18:33, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

All disk drives have low level formatting and it has nothing to do with the actuator mechanism. We low-level formatted when we had hydraulic actuators, open loop voice coil motors and external closed loop voice coil motors long before we had stepper and servos. Most of the material was specific to "PCs" and other small computers and ignored or was incorrect when one looks at the entire history. Tom94022 (talk) 20:08, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

So I went back and looked at the edit - at the time the stepper motor became widely used in the HDD industry it was principally used on IBM PC and compatibles (and of course Apple), the rest of the industry used, had been using and continued to use track following servos well into the 1990s. So the whole section was very specific to PCs of which IBM and its clones dominated the market. Most of what I removed was only accurate in context of IBM PCs and clones, e.g., did u use the BIOS to format an IBM S/360 disk pack? Go ahead and try to improve the article but please keep in mind that low level formatting goes back to the first commercial HDD. Tom94022 (talk) 20:21, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

• I reverted most of your material since yr distinction between mainframe and PC HDDs is without substance. Note that the ubiquitous 512 byte sector common to all computer system markets came from the PC market. The history about RLL vs MFM really applies to all disk drives, the controller and the drive had to have compatible specs. The same thing happened with earlier drives, it just wasn't as public. FWIW, I did try to add some of your content. Tom94022 (talk) 18:18, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

As well as I know it, 512 byte disk sectors were popular long before the IBM PC. The first computer system I remember them from is HP_Time-Shared_BASIC, but they were also popular on DEC systems like PDP-11 and VAX. The PDP-10 uses 576 byte sectors, or 128 of its 36 bit words, so a little more than 512. Seems to me that just about everyone except IBM's CKD used 512 or similar disk block sizes. Gah4 (talk) 05:30, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Most if not all subsystems other than IBM mainframe CKD and its compatibles used fixed sector sizes for HDDs and FDDs (even IBM used fixed sector sizes before and after CKD) and it is highly likely someone used 512 byte sectors before the IBM/XT, but it was the success of the PC with its 512 byte size that made it ubiquitous. Tom94022 (talk) 06:02, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

As far as I know, all VAX disks are 512 byte sectors. (VAX paging uses 512 byte pages, way too small.) If the PC didn't put DEC out of business, then 512 byte DEC disks might have become ubiquitous. People were already making 512 byte sector disks, and so those were used for the PC. (Pre-PC floppy controllers could do 128, 256, 512, and usually 1024 bytes/sector.) It would seem that were computers with keyboards existed before the PC, but the PC made them ubiquitous. But the most important distinction is byte addressability, which is pretty much due to IBM and S/360. Otherwise, power of two multiples of some other word size might have become more popular. Gah4 (talk) 18:33, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

You can't be serious about keyboards in general but I could make a similar observation about the PC keyboard layout becoming ubiquitous. There is no doubt that some DEC HDDs had 512 byte sectors (particularly PDP11) but DEC had other block sizes on DEC systems so I wouldn't call the block size ubiquitous for DEC. BTW, it all depends upon the controller not the system. I am pretty sure that some of the HDD controllers for VAX used a physical sector larger than 512 so as to accommodate other DEC architectures such as the 36 bit PDP10 (36*16=576). A VAX logical block size of 512 would be written to the larger physical block. Most pre-PCs controllers (such as the ones u cite) could do a variety of block sizes including non-binary but soon after the PC/XT they defaulted to 512 and then with SCSI and IDE there wasn't much choice for a long time (yes I know some have 520 byte block options). Why do you think the SCSI and IDE committees picked 512? Tom94022 (talk) 19:29, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, I wasn't trying to be too serious about keyboards, but it seemed about as obvious as disks. Yes the non-eight-bit-byte DEC machines used other sizes, but the world was converging on 8 bit bytes for S/360. Now, if intel hadn't made the 8080 but instead the 6060 or 9090, things might have been different. But once 8 bits caught on, 512 was likely PC or not. I suppose some possibility of 256 (many 5.25in floppys were 256 byte sectors, and 128 was popular for 8 in, from the IBM standard). As well as I know it, the DEC controllers can't choose. The PDP-10 controllers read/write 576, the VAX read/write 512, so tape if you want to cross between them. (The only one I actually know is RP-06.) The IBM floppy standard stores log2(N) in the sector header, so only allows for powers of two. Not so obvious is 256, 512, or 1024 would have won without the PC, but 512 seems more likely. VAX was pretty popular, though maybe overpriced, for some years, and DEC killed the 36 bit line. MicroVAX would have expanded 512 byte sectors to the low end without the PC. I am not sure what Apple might have done. As I remember the early SCSI drives, you could set the sector size and ask for a low-level format. The drive, in an hour or two, would format to that size. After not so long, only 512 or 520. I am not sure by now what sector size was used for SMD disks on Suns, but 512 or 520 seem likely. Sun also started using SCSI fairly early, though some were an ESDI drive with adaptor in the box. Gah4 (talk) 22:30, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree that a 2ⁿ Byte capacity per sector in the range of 128 to 2048 was likely for a byte oriented architecture but until the PC/XT took off it seems like different systems picked different sizes. I suspect the most likely size was 256 which was sort of standard on many FDD controllers. FWIW the ST-506 and the ST-412 formatted capacity was specified by Shugart with 256 KB sectors not 512; it was the Xebec controller used in the PC/XT which established 512 as the standard for a formatted ST-412 that every one then followed. I'm pretty sure it was chosen because it yielded 512 more data bytes per track (that is a very non-binary 17 sectors per track). Tom94022 (talk) 05:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

As for stepper motor, it does seem that was IBM. I remember a seek speed test program, run on an IBM (real) AT, and said something like "this drive is so slow, are you sure it isn't a floppy drive?" That was when I had a fast voice-coil Miniscribe 6053 at home.Gah4 (talk) 22:35, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

AFAIK IBM never made a stepper motor HDD; it did buy a bunch. In the late 1970s most HDD manufacturers were pushing areal density thru track following. There was an early stepper motor HDD by 3M in very limited volume but the breakthrough to low cost HDDs using stepper motors was first the Shugart SA4000 (14-inch), followed almost immediately by the SA1000 (8-inch) and then the ST-506, the latter imitated by many, Miniscribe included. Tom94022 (talk) 05:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

OK, 256 or 512, could have gone either way. I think 256 is best for 64K address space machines, where smaller buffers have an advantage, and 512 for larger machines, such as VAX and later PCs, but I might not be sure everyone else would figure that out. Note, though, the advantage of CKD: one can optimize the block size for the available machine memory, and in addition it is much easier to do locate mode I/O. Small 360's used 80 byte blocks, along with 8K to 64K core. One trades off efficient disk usage for efficient core usage. For larger machines, block size gets larger, disk usage is more efficient, and also I/O transfer is more efficient. As I noted before, the 512 byte page size of VAX was too small almost as soon as VAX was released, but that might have kept the 512 byte disk blocks around longer than they should have been. I now wonder, if the early PC had gone with 256, and not so much later it was found to be too small, they might have gone to 1024 or 2048, which are probably better choices for modern systems. (Well, who knows what current disks do inside.) But between VAX and Sun, I think 512 would have been pretty popular for some years. Gah4 (talk) 07:20, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

History of hard disk drives

I was not able to find any document suggesting Samsung had entered the worldwide HDD market in 1988. Would you be able to provide any reference?g2g886 (talk) 08:04, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

The cited reference (Disk/Trend 1989) gives the date of first shipment to a customer of the Samsung 3.5-inch 40 MB SHD2041 as fourth quarter 1988. This is sufficient, but if you want additional confirmation how about:

• A later Electronic News article dated Oct 21, 1991, notes that "Samsung initially approached the market with a 3.5-inch 40MB ..." which "was never very competitive ..."
• The 1988 Disk/Trend published before 4Q88 does not list any shipment date for the product.

Enuf? Tom94022 (talk) 16:20, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

HP 7935

I have some firsthand knowledge of the device having built them as a student intern in the early 80s on the assembly line. I took a rather tiny article and expanded it - it still could use some good fleshing out though. HP called it the BFD for at the tome they thought the capacity rather large. It was a staple on HP3000 & 9000 minicomputers. Not the most landmark device but was notable for a number of reasons. Mikebar (talk) 01:06, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

I noted a lopsidedness with the history article you might care to comment on. Not a personal comment but one on the article as a whole. Mikebar (talk) 01:40, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Floppy disks

Hi Tom, re my edits at floppy disk: The floppy disk drive indeed connects as a USB drive, as you said in your revert summary; but the article now says that the floppies themselves are used as an external drive, which doesn't make sense. Hence why I changed it to "could be used with an external USB drive", since you need the additional piece of hardware (USB FDD) to access floppies.

If you were thinking along the lines of "they are considered by the computer to be an external drive", in my experience USB floppy drives show up as drive A, so for all intents and purposes they are no different to an internal FDD. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:42, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry but there is no fixed relationship in Windows between drive letters and a designation of a drive as "external" or "internal". Anything connected by USB is regarded as "external," regardless of the drive letter assigned. An external device is treated quite differently from an internal, in many ways. It is not "for all intents and purposes no different from an internal FDD." Jeh (talk) 06:26, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps we have an interesting semantics issue - are we confusing internal/external a physical attribute with removable/non-removable (or mountable or ...) an OS attribute. I am not aware (maybe ignorant) of any Windows attribute such as internal/external and when I used to have them my external SCSI drives were treated by Windows the same as my internal IDE drives (different drivers of course) except in the case of SyQuest which was external but removable. BTW, at one time I had an internal removable SyQuest too. I believe Windows designates all USB drives as removable whether they are SSD, HDD, optical or FDD and of course they are external because they plug into a USB socket which is to the best of my knowledge always a connection to the outside. Also note the recent introduction of eSATA, removable in Windows or not? Tom94022 (talk) 17:29, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, USB (and FireWire) are not always connections to the outside! since motherboards do have USB, and sometimes FireWire, headers that can connect to e.g. a flash card reader that's mounted "internally" in a 3.5 or 5.25 bay.

It is true that "external" is not one of the "exposed" (if you know where to look) properties of devices in Windows, but it is an assumption of various bus drivers. USB is assumed to connect to external devices, ATA is not. This leads to setting some of the other device capabilities, which are exposed. The device capability most closely associated with this is indeed "removable." There is also "warm eject supported," meaning that the drivers support physical removal of the hardware, and of the device from the OS's device tree, while the system and the device are powered up and running, and "surprise remove OK", which means that even though "removable" the device won't show up in the "safely remove hardware" applet. "Removable" is implicit for anything on USB and FireWire - this is set in the drivers for their respective host controllers, and propagates to all of their child devices. SCSI is normally regarded as not removable because the usual drivers have no way to know if a particular SCSI device is on a physical interface where a hot disconnect can be done without electrical problems (SCA vs. old SCSI-1). SAS and SATA normally default to removable, but the OS turns this off for the drive containing your boot partition. In all cases, a device-specific driver, or a filter driver, or a bus filter driver can change what the bus driver decides. For example, if a mobo has an eSATA port it would be possible for the drivers that come with the mobo to add a filter driver to the SATA stack that would set the eSATA port "removable" but the others not. This would require knowledge in that filter driver of which port number was the eSATA port. But that would preclude people from effectively using hot-swap internally-mounted SATA bays. Jeh (talk) 19:14, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

It is complicated. I should have said mostly external, the best real world example of an internal USB device is an internal USB Floppy Disk Drive available from several sources but I am not sure there are too many of them. I guess they come with a mobo header to USB cable. FWIW, I wouldn't count flash card readers as USB devices because for the most part they do not use the USB connector. Tom94022 (talk) 07:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Open up Device manager, find one of the flash card readers (under "Disk drives", right click, select Properties. Details tab, hardware IDs. See all the PnP IDs that start with USBSTOR? Right. The operating system, the USB host controller driver, the USB host interface chip, and finally the driver for devices in the USB storage class, most certainly see them as USB devices! If the devices on the ends of the cable are "speaking" the USB protocol, and the signaling is electrically compatible with the USB specs, it's a USB device, even if the only "cable" is a set of traces running from one point on a PCB to another. The connector has nothing to do with it. Jeh (talk) 08:56, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

As I said, "I wouldn't count flash card readers as USB devices because for the most part they do not use the USB connector." They are Memory Cards, Flash Cards and that's how they are presented to the public. Only a few such are identified as USB and they use a USB connector. The internal OS support is IMO academic. Tom94022 (talk) 16:26, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

With very rare exceptions the flash card reader does have a USB connector. That's how it connects to the computer. The only way I can make sense of your claim is to assume that you're conflating the flash card itself with the reader. It is true that flash cards themselves (SD, CF, etc.) are not USB devices. (In fact a CF card is, as you know, a parallel ATA device!) But a flash card reader is, these days, almost always a USB device, specifically a USB mass storage device with its media removed. (Note that media removability and device removability are two very different things; all four combinations are possible.) When you put a flash card in a reader, the whole is a USB mass storage device with media present. Even on notebooks with e.g. built-in SD slots you'll find these devices use USB internally. A USB storage "key" is of course a USB mass storage device (removable) with non-removable media.

"With very rare exceptions": There are CF adapters for PCcard slots that are essentially just plug adapters; they take advantage of the PATA compatibility feature of those slots. No USB in that path. Conversely, though, every smart card reader I've tried that plugs directly into a ExpressCard actually uses USB internally: There's a "USB mode" in that slot, sort of similar to the "ATA mode" of the PCcard slot, except that it permits connection to a lot more different devices. Jeh (talk) 18:49, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

An external memory card reader probably has a USB connector so it is external not internal; I am not going to bother researching bulkhead mounted readers but 1) I suspect they have headers to connect to the mobo and not a USB connector and 2) they are by far the higher volume. BTW, to be very clear, by USB connector I mean a connector approved under one of the USB standards. Probably the best example is a PS/2 keyboard plugs into a PS/2 connector while a USB keyboard plugs into a USB port and, yes an adapter can change a PS/2 keyboard into a USB keyboard. The internal attachment and software layers is academic; the physical connector is part of the identity, at least that's how most of the world sees it. Tom94022 (talk) 20:55, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

I see. That's one way to look at things. The way I (and device manufacturers, and driver writers) look at it, the headers on the mobo are USB connectors. Says so in the mobo manual, and on the mobo itself. And they do have an industry standard pinout. If we paid attention to what "most of the world" knows or doesn't know we would still be in the dark ages. Tell me: if it's not USB, then what is it? If it's not USB, then disabling the USB host controller driver won't keep it from working.. right? Jeh (talk) 21:42, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for seeing it one way. I really don't think the Memory Card manufacturers advertise their devices as USB Memory Cards (except for a very few) nor do their customers think of them that way. On the subject of "dark ages" if we paid attention to what a few think then we wouldn't teach evolution in the schools. Of course if you pull out any layer in a layered OS the device will stop working; that doesn't mean a layer names the device only that it is accessed thru that layer. Let me give u one more example, I have a monitor with both DVI and HDMI connectors, depending upon my graphics card and the cable it can be accessed as either, but try as I can, I cannot find such a named driver in my Windows stack. And it happens another such monitor is connected thru a DVI cable to a DVI connector on a port replicator which in turn is connected to the system thru a USB cable and thus supported by the USB stack in part - I don't think anyone, even most driver developers would call such a monitor a USB device - do you? Tom94022 (talk) 08:01, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for beating an obviously dead horse, but it's that the card readers are USB devices, and memory cards aren't. See this listing for yourself, "USB" is clearly noted there, and NewEgg.com is all but an academic site. :) On the other hand, memory cards are Secure Digital, Compact Flash etc. types of devices; that's how they interface with the rest of a computer system (or an embedded device), and that's how they're named and marketed. — Dsimic (talk) 02:53, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

The card reader has a USB port but that doesn't make it a USB device nor is it so represented by Newegg unlike this one of many Newegg USB FDDs. Its all semantics :-) Tom94022 (talk) 03:42, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Format filler values

Hi Tom, I am looking for an explanation for the choice of a particular format filler value by various manufacturers and thought that you might know the answer.

For example, 8.0" (CP/M) floppy diskettes came pre-formatted with a filler value of E5h. (Since Tim Paterson took advantage of this fact, when he implemented the FAT12 file system for 86-DOS, this had and still has some interesting consequences for a number of odd implementation details of all FAT file systems up to the present.) But why were 8.0" floppies pre-formatted with E5h in the first place?

Another example: In all original IBM PCs since 1981 (and most compatible computers), freshly formatted floppies (and harddisks) are filled with a filler value of F6h. In IBM compatibles this value is stored in the Disk Parameter Table (INT 1Eh) by the BIOS and formatting tools (or formatting routines inside the BIOS) retrieve it from there during formatting. It can be changed easily to other values (and some clone manufacturers actually changed it to other values), but the question remains, why did IBM choose the value F6h, originally? What's special about it?

(Atari seems to have used E5h also on 5.25" and 3.5" floppies under GEM (probably by way of Digital Research), and Amstrad seems to have used F4h instead of F6h in some of their IBM PC compatible machines. On ROM and flash drives (which aren't actually formatted), the filler value often defaults to FFh in order to reduce wear, while on many modern hard disks it is 00h, if they are formatted by tools not adhering to INT 1Eh.)

Basically, these format filler values are "don't care" today, but I am trying to track down their origin and find out the technical reason for them. What I know for sure is that these values weren't a choice of random originally. I very vaguely remember having read somewhere (probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s), that this was down to FM/MFM properties or disk controller hardware peculiarities and seem to remember that these values represented bitpatterns particularly "good" to distinguish originally. But I am not sure about it any more and cannot remember the source.

Do you, perhaps, know the answer (or remember other format filler values by some vendors)?

Thanks and greetings --Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:28, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Excellent question, looking forward to tracking down the origins of those values! — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:40, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) That's perhaps related to the way DOS performs an optional verification after a floppy is formatted, so it first writes those values and reads/compares them later? Probably the filler value was selected so it's a bit pattern that "stresses out" well the properties of a magnetic media. See also the explanation of FDISK.EXE's behavior. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 14:56, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

To the best of my recollection they were driven by two things. First was an attempt to at least stress test the medium by using a challenging pattern (apprroaching worst case) and the second was to avoid a media defect in the data field looking like an address mark which was usually all zeros with one or more dropped clocks. The second criteria eliminates 00h (but it does raise the question of what happens when the user or system fills with all zeros). As I recall in MFM the worst case pattern in DB6h (an isolated zero as in ...1101 1011 0110 1101 10...); E5h and F4h are pretty much the same thing and approach worst case, F6h is closer. Some might argue that E5h/F4h are better because they have all three frequencies (1F, 1.5F and 2F) while the worst case and F6 have only two frequencies (1F and 2F) but I don't think that matters. I suspect the programmers being lazy didn't want to deal with a three hex character repeating field in a binary world :-) Tom94022 (talk) 06:59, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. Much appreciated! So, the selection of a particular value really seems to have been down to encoding/modulation properties, perhaps with some remaining level of freedom to choose from a small range of more or less equally "good" values. However, if there was some level of freedom involved, why did all manufacturers of 8-inch floppy diskettes use the same value? Was there any kind of standard defining this? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:24, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the small delay - I missed yr question. FWIW, the 8-inch industry was much smaller and IBM was the clear technology and product leader. Every media manufacturer needed to assure compatibility of their disks with IBM hardware so I suspect caution led them to format their media exactly as IBM did - if it ain't broke don't "improve" it mentality. That is, IBM was the defacto standard. I could ask around if a less vague answer is important. Tom94022 (talk) 17:00, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Well even more, it was usual for 8 inch floppies to come performatted. Maybe it was that drives weren't (yet) good enough to do it. I always thought that DEC sold preformatted floppies, so that they could charge more. When 5.25in floppies came out, there wasn't so much of a standard in place, many systems used their own specific format, and it was usual to sell them unformatted. (Or what was left after the last pass of testing.) As the IBM PC got popular enough, it became more usual to sell them with that format for convenience. Many DEC systems can't do low-level formatting, but could do high-level (writing the file system blocks). The latter was often INIT. By the time of 3.5in, both PC and Macintosh were popular, and they came formatted in one of those formats. Also, using preformatted 8 inch floppies, it was usual to do sector interleave with a look-up table. With 5.25 in, where the low level format was done by the user, it was more usual to write the sector headers with the appropriate interleave values. Some floppy controllers allow one to specify the fill byte, others don't. Gah4 (talk) 23:19, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

IBM "core drive"?

I seem to remember that IBM had, for the s/360 line, a sort of a "core drive": A box with a MB or so of slow core in it, with a selector channel interface. It acted like a 1 MB very fast disk drive. Do you recall the model number? Jeh (talk) 23:26, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

You may be thinking about the IBM 2361 LCS which to the best of my recollection was memory bus attached and used a memory interface and not the DASD interface. The S/360 M65 Functional Characteristics Manual sort of shows this. The 2314 Airlines Buffer feature was a disk cache but not separately addressable. I think the STK 4305 was the first "Solid State Disk" for an IBM Mainframe but it was S/370 era. Tom94022 (talk) 06:12, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Jeh (talk) 09:58, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

For outstanding contributions

The Computing Barnstar Tom94022 is hereby awarded this Computing Barnstar for DataVault and other outstanding contributions that have dramatically improved Wikipedia's coverage of how the bits are stored. – Margin1522 (talk) 20:08, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Solid-state laser and Solid-state disk

Hi, could you point out which part of my statement is not true?Ufim (talk) 14:11, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

@Ufim: My apologies, I was referring to both "all other types" and "semicondutor lasers are not ...". The latter is true but tape storage isn't solid state. Regardless the section u added still isn't justified nor particularly relevant to SSDs. And the material is aready coverred in Solid-state laser. Tom94022 (talk) 18:18, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

So, tape is liquid or gas? I still remember the days of the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors, and "solid state" being the usual label on transistorized equipment. Since the current flows through a semiconductor solid, instead of the vacuum of a tube, I suppose that makes sense. In the case of lasers, is isn't quite good enough. Near the beginning, there were gas and ruby lasers, ruby being a solid, but not a semiconductor. The currently popular lasers are semiconductor diode lasers, usually diode laser being close enough. Gah4 (talk) 08:22, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

:-) OK I suppose that is one definition of "solid state" but the more conventional definitions go along the lines of "no moving parts" (as in solid state lasers) or "electronic components, devices, and systems based entirely on the semiconductor" (as in SSDs) and I suspect the latter are the definitions that a reader of the non-redacted section might have used leading to the same confustion I had. Tom94022 (talk) 19:20, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

I suppose the no moving parts works, otherwise you need a liquid or gas bearing. (Somehow NASA gets tape drives to work in space, but not always very well.) Gah4 (talk) 23:43, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

@Gah4: Don't HDDs depend upon fluid dynamic bearings and lubricants - both liquids - so even by the broadest definition they are not "solid-state" storage. Also tapes drives (on earth) use air bearing guides taking them out of such a category.  :-) Tom94022 (talk) 21:07, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes, that was supposed to mean that I agreed for disks and tape. For lasers, though, I think it should be semiconductor, and not just solid state. The ruby laser is a solid state, but not semiconductor, laser. Gah4 (talk) 21:20, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

techniques for error correction

Dear Tom,

Recently you mentioned there are more than 2 techniques for error correction.

Could you give me a clue? Perhaps the name of one of these other types of error correction? Perhaps a book or article that describes some other type of error correction? Is there maybe a Wikipedia article I've overlooked that mentions another type of error correction?

Clearly the error correction article *should* mention these other techniques for error correction, but currently the error correction article (in section error detection and correction#Types) claims there only 2 types of error correction: ARQ and FEC (and some systems use a hybrid of both types).

I look forward to learning something new. --DavidCary (talk) 14:25, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

@DavidCary: I think we are talking about error correction. As used in the article FEC usually means codes and there are many error correction codes, see e.g.List_of_algorithms#Error_detection_and_correction. We aggree that if FEC means generic techniques for error correction in computing then there are at least three but I'm not sure this now referenced Wikipedia entry is generally valid for a world of only FEC, ARQ and Hybrid ARQ; note the RS uses the qualifier "major." In any event I have proposed the FEC article be merged into the ECC article leaving at most a stub for FEC in which case it is not so clear that the stub would mention the other two but only mention the more general Error_detection_and_correction. Tom94022 (talk) 19:25, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, there are many different error correction codes.

I only know 2 techniques for error correction.

If there are other techniques for error correction, I would like to learn more about them.

Also, I wish the Wikipedia error correction article mentioned those other techniques -- I could fix it myself if I knew anything about them.

As far as I know, every storage or communication system either doesn't do error correction, or uses FEC alone for error correction, or ARQ alone for error correction, or both.

It would be much easier for me to find out more about other techniques if I knew the name of even one other technique.

Could you give me a hint?

Please tell me the name of any technique for error correction that does not use either (a) an error-correction code or (b) a combination of an error-detection code plus automatic resend ?

--DavidCary (talk) 18:30, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

In computing then there are at least three but I'm not sure this now referenced Wikipedia entry is generally valid for a world of only FEC, ARQ and Hybrid ARQ; note the RS uses the qualifier "major," implying there maybe more than three. Tom94022 (talk) 19:18, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

redlinks

If you are gonna remove all redlinks in List of computer hardware manufacturers, then be sure to remove those that appear in the cases section and in all sections as well. You seem to be removing only newly added redlinks. Pancho507 (talk) 02:12, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

• @Pancho507:The page edit policy says no redlinks. I watch the page with a specific interest in a few sections so a change takes me there and I see a new redlink I remove it and cleanup the section it is in but I have a lot of other higher priority tasks. If you feel strongly about redlinks on this page then maybe you have the time to remove them. Tom94022 (talk) 02:45, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Who "says no redlinks"? I can't find red links mentioned anywhere in the WP:EDITING policy. The WP:REDLINK guideline seems to encourage redlinks in many cases. I look forward to learning something new. --DavidCary (talk) 23:18, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Please see the edit notice at the top of the of computer hardware manufacturers edit page. Tom94022 (talk) 07:15, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing that out. I see that this edit changed that notice, which for a long time *did* say "No red links.". There's some discussion at Template talk:Editnotices/Page/List of computer hardware manufacturers. Are you as annoyed as I am when the rules keep changing? :-) --DavidCary (talk) 23:59, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Well in this case I think it was a change for the better. :-) Tom94022 (talk) 00:42, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

AfC notification: Draft:Finis Conner has a new comment

I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:Finis Conner. Thanks! JSFarman (talk) 01:29, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Cassette tape (obsolete)

The article Cassette tape (obsolete) has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Redundant to Cassette tape (disambiguation)

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. ... discospinster _talk 02:32, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Nomination of Cassette tape (obsolete) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Cassette tape (obsolete) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cassette tape (obsolete) until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. ... discospinster _talk 16:13, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

List of ...

There is an article: List_of_discontinued_photographic_films, and a variety of other such List of ... articles. I am not so sure about a List of discontinued cassette formats, but maybe List of discontinued audio recording systems, List of discontinued video recording systems, and 'List of discontinued data storage systems. Though I am not sure how many obsolete ones are actually discontinued. Gah4 (talk) 17:00, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gah4: It seems to me that the museum is doing a pretty good job of listing them so I am not sure an article "List of obsolete tape cassettes and cartridges" would add much to Wikipedia that the link already doesn't give. I suppose just "Obsolete tape cartridges and cassettes" might be an alternative to "Cassette tape (obsolete)" but it would still be a short article mainly pointing to the museum. Tom94022 (talk) 18:04, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Alice and Bob

This is a tangent to the WP:EL discussion, but "Carol" is a standard character in the story of Alice and Bob. See Alice and Bob#Cast of characters for a long list of names. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:27, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing OK, but it is confusing - there is a reasonable connection between the links from Bob->Alice and Bob and from Alice->Alice and Bob but the original text was Carol->Carol which is an improper link to a disambiguation page and the link of Carol->Alice and Bob is unobvious to say the least. It was not clear to me what the editor intended by this but if the intention was to have valid wikilinks in the first column then I suppose the current construction is acceptable. But this also demonstrates the simplistic nature of the section in that it doesn't deal with any of the many alternatives to a wikilink at the beginning of a row of list or in the first column of a row of a list organized as a table. I suggest the whole section needs a revision to reflect the real world of lists in all forms with many row attributes. Tom94022 (talk) 16:08, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

The original text linked to [[Alice and Bob|Carol]], not to the disambiguation page. That link probably makes sense to most people who realized the names were in alphabetical order and who read the first sentence of the linked article ("fictional characters commonly used as a placeholder name"). Anyone who wanted to be extra-certain that Carol belonged to that group needed only to finish reading the article.

For the most part, though, I expect that editors glanced at it, thought, "Oh, alphabetical names, obviously just examples, and I'm here for the external links, not the internal ones anyway", and didn't give it a second thought. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:12, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing I'm pretty sure the original text was [[Carol]] and it improperly got changed to what is now in one of the reversals of my changes. Regardless, I agree that most editors either never invoked the link or if they did and wound up at the disambiguation page did not care. That was my first response. And right now there are bigger issues in the article than this minor detail. Tom94022 (talk) 19:41, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. Here's a link to the original. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:33, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

No, the original text was as we said, you removed it here. Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 21:14, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Mass storage edits

I'd like to clean up and complete the {{cite}} templates in Mass storage and also quote the definition from the Naval Postgraduate School report; would you mind giving me a heads up when you're done with your current string of edits? Thanks. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 23:25, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@Chatul:I'm done with my edits in Mass storage. While you may quote the definition from the Naval PGS it is certainly not current. I've looked for an RS for a definition without too much luck. The problem is the definition changes with time an context - an FDD and the 3850 were contemporaneous MS devices! You might try the IEEE MSS proceedings for a current definition and hopefully how it has changed with time. Otherwise yr definition wind ups as OR. Good luck Tom94022 (talk) 07:43, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

For the purpose of stating the original usage of the term, older is better.

As for floppies, while they around in the late 1960s, well before the 3850, I never saw anybody refer to them as mass storage until PCs became popular in the 1980s. To put things in context, the 1956 IBM 350 had a capacity of 5 million 6-bit characters, larger than today's 1.44 and 2.88 MB 3.5" floppies, and it was well and truly obsolete by the time the 8" floppy came out on the IBM 2835 Storage Control. The 1965 IBM 2314 stored 29 MB per disk pack.

Thanks. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:40, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Chatul: It's not clear to me that the NPG usage of mass storage is the first such usage which might be duly noted in the article - the current definition is certain relevant if you can find one. As you noted FDDs were referred to as mass storage in the context of PCs even though their capacity was less than the original HDD and far less than any then contemporaneous HDD or any then contemporaneous mainframe mass storage; all of which is why finding any comprehensive definition will be difficult. IMO the NCR CRAM and the IBM 2321 were early mass storage systems but AFAIK never called such so finding an RS for comprehensive definition even tougher. Again good luck. Tom94022 (talk) 21:34, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Tom94022:I don't know of an earlier use of the term mass storage than than 1972, although the IBM 2321 NCR CRAM and RCA 3488 Random Access Card Equipment certainly were in that niche. Have you checked the bibliography in the survery or back issues of, e.g., Datamation? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 23:22, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

@Chatul:Good ideas, from Datamations:

• 1960 Bryant advertises "Magnetic Disc Files for mass storage up to 150,000,000 bits."
• Jan 1962 an article "The Hardware Transition" by J. Presper Eckert contains "Mass Storage: Units which can store 50 to 1,000 million characters and have access times in the 25 to 200 millisecond range are going to be increasingly common." and identifies the drums of the Univac LARC as mass storage.
• Feb 1963 article on Fortran, "Most real-time. systems, and particularly those which possess mass storage devices such as drums or disks, require ..."
• The 1963 FJCC seminars:

Session 2, Computer Memories. "demands for larger storage systems. Mass storage requirements of lO⁸ or 10⁹ bit capacities have been achieved with electro·mechanical techniques"

Session 8, Mass Storage Systems, Irving L. Wieselman, Chairman, Data Products Corp.

This session explores mass storage systems with emphasis on design parameters, functional properties and their influence on applications. The class of device considered provides fast random-access to a large• capacity erasable store, available on-line to a data processor. Equipment with these properties satisfies the needs of users with business, scientific, and military applications.

The session opens with a survey paper defining the class of equipment to be discussed and then traces the historical development. Storage devices such as magnetic tape units and photographic equipment are not included since they do not satisfy the basic requirements. Next, the application requirements which led to particular design configurations are discussed. Individual characteristics of and comparisons between the following types of devices are examined: moving and fixed head drums and disc files; removable stack disc files; magnetic card memories and static mass memories. In addition, some predictions are made regarding the future dominance of moving media mass storage devices versus static mass memory storage devices.

The paper on the IBM 1311 Disc Storage Drive describes the improvement in technology required to achieve a system which features both high bit densities and the high degree of equipment compatibility needed to permit removable disc packs to be placed on other drive mechanisms and still maintain reliable operation. Design considerations involving a number of different technologies such as read/write heads, read/write electronics, air bearings and magnetic surfaces are covered in detail.

The paper on the Burroughs Disc File treats a different set of problems in the design of a storage device where access time depends only on rotational latency. In order to achieve large capacities in a fixed head file, high bit densities are used in conjunction with a multiplicity of heads. The disc itself is metallic coated, using electroplating techniques. The technology describes how several head assemblies are used in a single flying pad. In addition, the data organization, capacity and data rates are discussed. Finally the problem of switching between the heads and the packaging techniques are described.

The paper on the multiple-access disc file describes the Data Products dp/f-5035 DISCfiLE system. This is characterized by individual positioners for each disc and their utilization in a system configuration, where simultaneous data transfers may occur on two discs while two other positioners are also being moved to new locations at the same time. The design properties of the disc, heads and positioners are described, as well as the flexibility in operations obtained through the use of the individual positioners. The implication of the design on the performance of the associated data processor is also stressed.

The last paper deals with an approach by Thompson Ramo Wooldridge whereby a plated woven screen is used as the basic storage medium. Access to data is achieved by coincident-current switching. The method of storing with a woven aperture screen plane as well as the improvement in technology of plating to allow for the coincident-current mode will be discussed. The system has been investigated in a laboratory developmental program. The extension of techniques to a mass memory and the economics of the proposed design completes the paper.

In summary, three of the papers are devoted to newly announced equipment configurations utilizing rotating discs for storage, but each having a different design goal and hence utility in different application areas. The fourth paper covers an all solid state approach which has an access time approaching that of core memories but a higher cost-per-bit and is not yet available. The survey paper serves to show relationships, advantages and disadvantages to the various approaches. The session will also stress the relationship between economic factors and performance.

Datamation, October 1963, p. 53-4

• Datamation July 1966 has an article "A REVIEW OF ELECTROMECHANICAL MASS STORAGE" and it is really about HDDs and other random access devices.

Based upon the above it's pretty clear that the term was first applied to the first random access devices with capacity significantly greater than main memory (i.e., secondary storage) and then to random access devices with ith capacity significantly greater than the common secondary storage (usually HDDs) with a somewhat retrograde usage with FDDs for the early PCs. This has been interesting original research so I am not sure how we can turn it into a definition in the article. Maybe just say it with pointer to the refs? If u and I agree, who would disagree :-)? Tom94022 (talk) 00:45, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I've added references from the bibliography of the survey and rearranged some text. At this point we might want to consider a History of nomenclature section and add {{cite magazine}} for some of the stuff that you found. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 01:09, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

@Chatul: it looks pretty good, maybe I'll add something from 1963 FJCC thereby pushing the date back even further and establishing the term was originally applied to secondary storage devices like HDDs. Now we should clean up media section which is a non-sequitur at best. Tom94022 (talk) 02:01, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Notes

Deleted

Difference between GB and GiB

Hey there! I want to thank you for correcting errors in the Computer data storage article. I've noticed you've changed some "GiB" to "GB" on your edit here. I just want to let you know that the "GiB" are not typos. The "GiB" stands for gibibytes (which are different from gigabytes). You may already know the difference between "GiB" and "GB", but I'll just briefly explain for your convenience, because this misunderstanding is quite common in the industry. A GiB is equivalent to exactly 1073741824 bytes (1024^3), whereas a gigabyte has exactly 1000000000 bytes (1000^3). Usually, if you see numbers that are powers of 2 (numbers such as 16, 32, 64, etc. especially for things like RAM) it usually uses binary prefixes of KiB, MiB, and GiB, etc. Let me know if that clarifies any confusion. Somerandomuser (talk) 22:07, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Often enough MB and GB are used for rough approximations. If the uncertainty is more than the difference between GiB and GB, can we just use GB? Note, for example, that the formatted capacity of an unformatted disk drive is likely uncertain by that amount, considering the possible block and gap sizes. I did always find it interesting that the IBM 3330 (404*19*13030) has a capacity of 100,018,280 bytes, enough for IBM to call it 100MB. That only works with track sized blocks, though, and the VTOC probably has smaller blocks. Note for example that SSD commonly come in 240GB and 480GB models, and not 256GiB and 512GiB. There is some overhead internal to the drive, in addition to file system overhead. Gah4 (talk) 23:21, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@Somerandomuser: Perhaps you are not aware that IEC Binary prefixes are not allowed in this Wikipedia except in limited situations - for the most part we editors are required to use the so-called conventional binary prefixes such as GB instead of GiB. Personally I think it is a mistake to deprecate the IEC binary prefixes. Let me know if that clarifies any confusion you may have. I invite you to start a dialog at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers to allow broader usage of these prefixes. Tom94022 (talk) 07:46, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Regarding IBM System/360 architecture

Hi,

As I have previously stated in the edits, the correct category is Category:Instruction set architectures and not Category:Computer architecture for two reasons:

1. The article primarily deals with the ISA from my limited understanding. In that perspective, categories should relate directly to the article, otherwise we would have multiple unrelated and sometimes conflicting categories.

2. Category:Instruction set architectures is a subcategory of Category:Computer architecture, therefore having the latter category separately mentioned is redundant, especially given that it is a diffusing category.

Let me know your thoughts.

Best regards, CoolingGibbon (talk) 15:22, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

EDIT: However, I would be in favor of having the article in either of the two categories, depending on whatever is suitable, but not both simultaneously.

Re Floppys are obsolete vs almost obsolete

Where are floppies still in use? And at what point does the usage fall below the threshold from largely obsolete to obsolete? Mtpaley (talk) 22:54, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

@Mtpaley: See Floppy disk usage in the 21st century particularly footnote 24. Tom94022 (talk) 06:05, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Computer Memory

You are misstating wikipedia policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples states that "They are reliable as a citation to the existence of an invention and its date (e.g., "A patent was issued to Alice Expert on May 5, 2010..."). They are reliable for attributed statements about their contents (e.g., "According to five-year-old inventor Steven Olson in his application for US Patent #6,368,227, issued in 2002, he invented swinging sideways because swinging back and forth might get boring.") A patent will also contain a section referencing previous literature, which may be a good source to search for other citations." As such, the patent cited supports the edits I made and unless you provide contrary evidence , I ask that you restore my edits. Bangthedash101 (talk) 20:52, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bangthedash101: While a patent may be a reliable source for its material claimed and its date it is not a reliable source for the many claims you make about it, starting with placing it in an article about Computer Memory and asserting it as an "important first step." As near as I can tell the patent has nothing to do with Computer Memory and is certainly not an important first step there to. Likewise, there is nothing in the patent that establishes it as the "first" static magnetic memory. As you admit, the invention, whatever it was, was too slow for computer applications. You should find a RS that somehow relates Devol to computer memory to make such assertions. You might note that work on magnetic core memory development goes back prior to the priority date of the first Devol patent so such a finding is unlikely. It appears to me the deletion was valid and therefore am unwilling to restore your edit. Tom94022 (talk) 06:49, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

SSD's NAND flash manufacturer

YMTC is a now major NAND chip maker, article only show 5 major manufacturers by their maket share. REF:- https://www.ssdwiki.com/nand-manufacturers/. QUOTE:-(One of the younger companies is Yangtze Memory Technologies, a Chinese manufacturer that has established itself as a significant player in the NAND memory market.)

Sayanpdd (talk) 08:07, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

@Sayanpdd:As your ref says: "Other than the “big five”, Flash memory manufacturers are few and far between" with YMT is in the other category. I changed yr edit to reflect your ref Tom94022 (talk) 16:22, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

File:Charles H. Coleman.jpg permission

Hi! I am looking at the license for File:Charles H. Coleman.jpg. You linked to this website, but that link does not say the image is licensed under a compatible Creative Commons license. Do you have a link which shows that the image is licensed under a Creative Commons license? Best, HouseBlaster (talk · he/they) 14:44, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

I don't recall making such a link but I think the image is licensed by the IEEE, see: ETHW IP policies. If you have any questions about the policies that apply to this image you might contact the IEEE ETHW at ieee-history@ieee.org Tom94022 (talk) 19:58, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

I think it is simpler to relicense it as non-free, which I will do so momentarily. I highly doubt IEEE intended to allow commercial redistribution of the photograph. HouseBlaster (talk · he/they) 21:50, 13 August 2024 (UTC)