HopperJF wrote:
The Amiga was not whiter than white either, with its standard 880k disks only usually containing 837k of space.
Actually, the Amiga could access 879KB with FFS. 837 was the capacity with OFS. Bear in mind also that those floppy disks actually have a capacity of 1MB, and HD floppies have a 2MB capacity unformatted. PCs could use 720KB or 1.44MB of the HD types, Amigas could use 880Kb or 1.76MB. After that you have the overheads of disk.info files, volume information and other filesystem stuff taking up another KB or two...
Being the modest honest guy I am, when people ask me the capacity of the drive, I will say 150Gb. It's a shame manufacturers can't apply the same honesty.
I dunno, basically this has always been the case, it's only more obvious recently with massive disc capacity widening the gulf between base 2 and base 10, and in fairness I've always seen a remark printed on hard drive documentation to the effect of 1Gb=1,000,000,000 bytes. It's just a convention, the same way that the kW output of your car, measured at the engine, is much less by the time the power reaches the wheels due to losses in the transmission. Once it's quoted as flywheel power, it's really up to the consumer to know the difference. It's not nice, I agree, but I don't see the problem with manufacturers bending stats to sell products once they follow a convention that standardizes it.
