From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Sep 24 07:49:15 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id HAA10038 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Thu, 24 Sep 1998 07:49:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from Raccoon.ChipChat.com (Raccoon.ChipChat.com [206.2.228.130]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA10022 for ; Thu, 24 Sep 1998 07:49:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mrc@ChipChat.com) Received: from ChipChat.com (MRC-Tiger.ChipChat.com [206.2.228.141]) by Raccoon.ChipChat.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with SMTP id OAA08492; Thu, 24 Sep 1998 14:48:59 GMT Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:48:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Marty Cawthon To: Steve Friedrich cc: freebsd Subject: Re: fragmentation In-Reply-To: <199809241407.KAA02432@laker.net> Message-ID: X-X-Sender: mrc@Raccoon.ChipChat.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Steve Friedrich wrote: > You're probably aware that DOS and Winblows use "clusters" of sectors, > due to poor design choices by IBM/Microsoft/Intel in the initial design > of the PC. Information is stored in disk sectors which are frequently (chop) > worth of sectors in the FAT table (File Allocation Table). That's an > incredible waste of space, and products are available to shrink the (chop) --------------------- Historical Note --------------------- I am pretty sure that the FAT file system was developed entirely by Microsoft - neither Intel nor IBM had any hand in its design. It is possible that Microsoft got the basic design of FAT from Seattle Computer Products, from whom they purchased SB-DOS and re-worked it to be MS-DOS 1.0. As I recall Bill Gates was personally credited with much of the technical design of FAT. This information is from my memory, which is neither ECC nor Parity, but is still "PGM" - Pretty Good Memory. Marty Cawthon ChipChat To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message