As Paul said, disks with fixed-length sectors are represented as fixed-length, data-only records.

The IBM 7094 and Honeywell 516 disks have variable length records, and the track format includes metadata on record lengths and block addresses. The IBM 1401 and 1620 disks include metadata for the block addresses, which is not necessarily based on geometry.

/Bob Supnik

On 9/25/2018 12:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Message: 3
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2018 09:53:04 -0400
From: Paul Koning<[email protected]>
To: Folkert van Heusden<[email protected]>
Cc:[email protected]
Subject: Re: [Simh] disk file format (rk05)
Message-ID:<[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=us-ascii

Disks are just sectors.  I think that's true generally; if SIMH supported any 
systems with variable length disk blocks something else would be needed, but 
the only system I can think of that does so is the IBM 360.  (Actually, that 
one is much stranger, with its keyed sector feature.)

_______________________________________________
Simh mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh

Reply via email to