> There was some time when 3.14 MB was a big unit of measurement

I don't know what storage medium that refers to. Plain old 3.5" floppies only went up to 1.44 MB.

Oh. You are correct. I don't know how I ended up with PI there.

You know how old computers always rounded things to the nearest pi...

Get out of here.

(Still sore Apple did not stick to the 1kB = 1000 bytes of the original MacOS and gave in to the "powers of two" insanity ;-)

I don't get why you are being downvoted. Are people not familiar with the expression "get out of here" used in a friendly manner? Or do they really downvote you because they think it is so bad that you think that 1kB should be equal to 1000 bytes? I mean, I don't agree with you either but IMO the downvote should only be used for things that are either factually wrong, or which detract strongly from the conversation, or which contribute nothing at all. I think your comment is nice and it does not deserve to be downvoted.

Yeah, apparently downvotes can be used as a "disagree" signal. Usually when I see a comment being unfairly downvoted that way, I upvote as a counter-balance, even if I disagree with the argument (i.e., how many bytes in 1kB).

> (Still sore Apple did not stick to the 1kB = 1000 bytes of the original MacOS and gave in to the "powers of two" insanity ;-)

Actually, Apple switched back to 1kb = 1000 bytes ("back" assuming you're right about the original MacOS) with Snow Leopard back in 2009. [1]

[1] https://blog.macsales.com/1852-snow-leopard-changes-they-way...

Yeah that was great - you could not actually represent real computer resources correctly without 4 decimal places.

When was the last time you bought something that gave you exactly 1073741824 bytes to the gigabyte on the box?

A RAM module?

I do embedded a lot. Everything is powers of two.

Including data transmission?

NeXT 3.5" floppy drives could do 2.88 MB, but that was at a time when Iomega Zip and Jaz drives were bridging between floppy and writable CD.

2.88MB was supported by most drives and was usable under Linux. You were supposed to use proper 2.88MB floppy, but you could usually get away with using a 1.44MB floppy and reformatting.

I'm not entirely sure how well they were supported under Windows though.

IIRC the Windows 95 install floppies were 2.88MB. With that in mind it's probably safe to assume that they were at least readable even in DOS, although I don't recall being able to format or write to a floppy at that capacity in any version of DOS/Windows.

no, 1.68MB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

A few month back I authoritatively stated that floppies allowed for 3.14Mb, understanding my mistake only a few minutes later and being thoroughly ashamed. Now I now there's some reason behind it, not just a random glitch of memory.

1.44 MB is the wrong number anyway, since its's mixing the deifiniton of Kilo as 1000 and 1024 to get to the Mega.

I relived a part of my childhood by playing Chip's Challenge again the other day: https://archive.org/details/chips_challenge_windows_3.x

Note that you can buy Chip's Challenge 1, 2, and Chuck's Challenge 3D from the guy who originally created it. https://store.steampowered.com/developer/niffler

There is an interesting podcast with a "Chuck" Somerville interview. He started on the Apple ][. Its pretty fun walk through the industry in the 80s, and touches on getting the "Chips Challenge" name back from the group that bought it.

http://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/apple-time-warp-podcast-epis...

Most of that effort to archive games is not IA. It is from 2 other groups who sometimes work with IA if they all are not fighting. Specifically one group is the one going through all of them and configuring them to work correctly in DOSBox. Another is just going through and just cataloging them. Getting the metadata on that stuff is kind of tough now. Like what was the exact date a game came out on? Does it have artwork still? Is there some odd protection scheme going on? Is there an IMG file for the disks? Or is it just some random pile of files? Can you get a copy from ebay? etc etc etc. IA typically notes who is doing the archive work. IA also respects takedown notices for these games. As many of them sort of came back from the dead and are sold again, or the company just does not want its IP on some random site. A good portion though no one really knows who owns them anymore. Some have clear lineage. Some have been sold over and over to random companies and depending on contracts no one knows.

That 'scene' is also full of drama and very insular. Donate to IA to help them build better infrastructure and better search. But donating because they host old abandoned DOS games I would not call a good reason, and misplaced. Because the people doing the majority of the work are doing it because they like it, not money. IA does have some work around that such as getting dosbox and mame running in a browser. Just be clear on what you are donating to.

It's not quite limited to small files. Give https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dragons_Lair_1993_1993 a try :)

Thanks, just played Xonix for the first time in a while. The other dos boxes I've found were too fast to actually play.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Xonix_1984