| Date: | August 19, 2005 / year-entry #233 |
| Tags: | history |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34513 |
| Comments: | 36 |
| Summary: | Thirteen. In case you were wondering. And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping. (I'm sure there... |
Thirteen. In case you were wondering. And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping. (I'm sure there are the conspiracy-minded folks who think that DMF was invented as an anti-piracy measure. It wasn't; it was a way to reduce the number of floppy disks. That the disks were difficult to copy was a side-effect, not a design goal.) (For comparison, Windows 3.1 came on six floppies. Windows NT 3.1 came on twenty-two. And yesterday, one of my colleagues reminded me that Windows NT setup asked for the floppy disks out of order! I guess it never occurred to them that they could renumber the disks.) |
Comments (36)
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Windows 95’s 10-year anniversary is just days away! (Aug 24, 1995)
I wonder if there’s gonna be any kind of special goings-on or anything…
I personally loved those DMF formatted disks. I remember a utility became available that allowed you to format any disk in DMF format. Saved myself a lot of disk swapping with files, getting that little extra capacity out the disks. The DMF capacity was 1.68 MB.
See here for a more complete history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
Come on, spill the beans. How many floppy disks will Windows Vista come on?
So I make it 1721 HD floppies for Windows Vista Pro (Beta 1) or only 1319 if you use the special Distribution Media Format again – think of the savings this time :-)
– David
I remember that a version of Office or WordPerfect came on an ungodly 30+ floppies. I remember installing and by the 20-somethingth disk I knew that it was high time for a new media format.
The CD will probably go down as one of the best inventions of all time. It was 440 times better than the media it replaced. Not many inventions EVER in history can claim that kind of improvement.
My wife got a Digital notebook at one time that came with Windows 95 pre-installed, but didn’t include distribution media. What it included was a set of 30 floppy disk labels, and a utility to create the distribution media on 30 floppies that you provided.
We actually created them, just in case. (It was a work computer, so we didn’t have to buy the floppies.)
Derek: DMF was 1.68MB, and I’m pretty sure DOS could handle them natively. I certainly remember keeping some of my backups on 1.68MB floppies under MS-DOS 6.2…
I vaguely remember a statistic about win95 requiring like 60% of the floppy production when it shipped…
The company I used to work for created Tax software. At one time, our complete Tax package was about 58 floppy disks. We were a bit late moving to the CD-Rom scene… :P
Let me report the flip side:
We put out a software that runs better with faster processor and more memory – consumes more memory than oracle or exchange. So the recommended configuration is the latest (dual core) processor and 2-4GB of memory.
But the software installation package (including a driver package) still fits on ONE floppy.
The format worked by stuffing more tracks/sectors per track on the disk. This information is stored in the BPB in the boot record of the disk, but IIRC some BIOSes could only handle specific "official" values. (80×18 = 1.44MB) It was possible to reliably get it up to 1.72MB (82×21), but Microsoft was a little conservative.
There was a great tool called "fdformat" that would let you play with this, as well as sector skew and such for performance. Another one manager to fit 2 MB on a floppy, but it varied the number of sectors per track depending on the region of the disk. No BIOS could handle that, so it always required a TSR to read the disks.
You can find some of the details of the Distribution Media Format (DMF) here:
http://www.winimage.com/wimushlp/wini1a1y.htm
Win 3.1 came on 7 disks. Disk 7 was international printer drivers. I realise you guys probably only got the lite version.
Another nice thing was that Win9x came on CAB files, which was easier to manage when copied to CD, or network. A small thing, but nice, compared to hundreds or thousands of files. I see that Vista has moved the NT code base to what appears to be 1 file … nice.
The greatest thing about moving from floppies to CDs was the improved reliability. There was nothing worse that getting to disk 13 and having it be unreadable, or worse just getting bad data…
I don’t miss misaligned head heads, dusty disks, etc.
I remember hearing somewhere that the failure rate for floppies were something like 1 in a 100.
At the same time, some of them seems to last forever. I know of an Atari 800 XL that has been booting, every morning off, the same floppy disk for the last 20 years.
WhenI worked at Teradyne we got one of the early shiny new VaxStatations — an actual "real" computer with a "real" operating system that you could carry around!
To bad it didn’t come preloaded with the software — IIRC, 45 disks for VMS, plus roughly the same number for the C compiler and linker. And it wasn’t smart enough to check the disk numbers: if you put them into the machine in the wrong order you had to start all the way from the beginning again :-(
Trivia: the later Vaxstation 2000 had the option of swapping locally or over ethernet. In my case, with a "fast" connection and a slow disk, they were each about as fast.
Peter
"Win 3.1 came on 7 disks. Disk 7 was international printer drivers. I realise you guys probably only got the lite version."
I know the version that I had only had 6 disks. I do live in the United States, though. Windows for Workgroups, on the other hand, came on 7.
I remember the inventor of those floppies. He still works at Microsoft. See patent 5,745,313.
My first full-time job at Microsoft was as a Windows builder (specifically, for the Win9x platforms). One of my very first tasks as a full-timer was to verify that master floppies for Win95 so that they could send them off to be mass-produced, boxed, and shipped (I was hired as a full timer just as Win95 was getting ready to ship).
Talk about knowing that you have to do your job right – the last thing I wanted was to miss something stupid and screw up Win95 distribution.
Thankfully, all was well. And, I still work here. Go figure. Happy 10th birthday Win95 on 8.24.05!
-Christopher [MSFT]
(Actually one reason it asked for the disks out of order was that it asked for one of the disks twice.)
Was Windows 98 ever distributed on floppies, or planned to be? Because all the CAB files are 1760k, which is a little bigger than the Win95 ones, but would correspond to 80 tracks and 22 sectors/track.
If so, I shudder to think of the size of the packaging, because the filenames go up to WIN98_74.CAB. You’d probably end up with nearer to 80 floppies all told.
I still got the original set of 13 disks… boy was it a pain to install!
And we complain now when we have to switch CDs to install something :)
But how come I remembered I had 10 or 11 disks for Win 3.1? It’s mystrious for me. :)
And somehow I remembered not all floppy drives at that time supports 2.88MB floppies.
This reminds me of one of my favorite SA contest entries (apologies for the filename, but worksafe):
http://images.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/photoshop/04-16-04-media/fuckingtest.jpg
Reminds me of an OS distribution for the Apollo Unix workstation. The boss was too mean to buy a tape drive, so we got the alternative distro which came on ninety-something floppies.
My install attempt came to an end when a disk somewhere in the high 80’s was bad…
I came late to compact disks. I was one of the first people in Australia to buy Borland Delphi 1.0 (hi, Anders!) through official channels — I had to convince the local salesdrones that they had such a product — and I didn’t have a CD drive at the time. Fortunately, although I didn’t think so at the time, Borland simply didn’t supply it on floppies this far out from California, so I went over to a friend’s place with my computer, my new Delphi CD and a screwdriver, and did a bit of hardware installation before I did the software. Then I UN-installed the hardware and took my box home. Thank the gods I didn’t need to reinstall for any reason before I upgraded my computer.
I used one of the early versions os OS/2 version 2. That also came on a huge number of floppies. What was *REALLY* annoying is that setup and install code would look for one file at a time that it needed. You would constantly have to be shuffling floppies, including ones you had previously put in!
I still have all 24 floppies for Office 4.3. When I bought it, Microsoft admitted that it would be coming out on CD as well but wouldn’t give me any timeframe. I am still bitter :-)
I got Win95 on CD, because, a couple years before, I bought VC++ 1.0. I think it was 21 floppies. The next day I bought a CD-ROM.
Something is broken in My current computer and the floppy drive doesn’t work. I didn’t even notice for a year.
From my ancient floppy collections…
(all counts based on 5.25" floppies)
Windows 1.0 – 5 disks
Windows 2.0 – 8 disks (WinWrite on Disk 9)
Windows 2.1 – 4 disks
(Win 1.0 used 40 track "DSDD" disks, while Win 2.1 used 80 track "High Capacity" (1.2mb) disks. I assume win 2.0 were also the low capacity disks, but they aren’t labeled)
Re: IE 1.0, code-named O’Hare (remember, Win95 was Chicago).
IE was supposed to be in Windows 95. However, IE’s schedule slipped, it couldn’t freeze along with the rest of the product, and it was booted out of the retail version. The new-machine version didn’t need as big a manufacturing lead time (not that many OEMs as end users, for some reason) so IE got into it.
Win95 Plus! also locked down after retail Win95. So IE got into Plus!.
About reordering disks, in Spain I have been to an office building where numbers just outside elevators where projected on the wall, instead of a small bronze or plastic number. So, if they had to insert another floor or reorder them, the numbers in the walls were a non-issue.