Misplaced Pages

#55944

70-459: AppleSingle is similar in concept to the more popular MacBinary format, in that the resource and data forks are combined with a header containing the Finder information. In fact, the format is so similar, it seemed there was no reason why Apple did not simply use MacBinary instead, which by that point was widely known and used. Some not-so-obvious reasons are explained in an Internet Draft. The format

140-596: A .bin or .macbin file extension appended to the ends of their filenames. E-mail programs such as Eudora can extract and decode MacBinary mail messages. Most dedicated FTP programs for the Mac, such as Fetch and Transmit , transparently decode MacBinary files they download. MacBinary is similar to BinHex , but MacBinary produces binary files as opposed to ASCII text. Thus, MacBinary files are smaller than BinHex files, but older applications and servers are more likely to corrupt them. The first incarnation of MacBinary

210-439: A floppy , a diskette , or a disk ) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when

280-443: A button that, when pressed, ejects the disk with varying degrees of force, the discrepancy due to the ejection force provided by the spring of the shutter. In IBM PC compatibles , Commodores, Apple II/IIIs, and other non-Apple-Macintosh machines with standard floppy disk drives, a disk may be ejected manually at any time. The drive has a disk-change switch that detects when a disk is ejected or inserted. Failure of this mechanical switch

350-586: A copy of the AppleDouble metadata stored in a __MACOSX directory. Unwanted "._" files can be removed using dot_clean -m on Mac OS X. Doing so also merges AppleDouble metadata with the corresponding files. AppleDouble files can be manually created through creative abuse of ditto (which is AppleDouble-aware) and unzip (which is not). On other systems, the ad command and a Perl script called apple_dump can be used to view AppleDouble data. Both are part of Netatalk . The macOS system provides

420-650: A customized operating system is used that has no drivers for USB devices. Hardware floppy disk emulators can be made to interface floppy-disk controllers to a USB port that can be used for flash drives. In May 2016, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within federal agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy disks are still used to coordinate "the operational functions of

490-428: A disk can be accessed, the drive needs to synchronize its head position with the disk tracks. In some drives, this is accomplished with a Track Zero Sensor, while for others it involves the drive head striking an immobile reference surface. In either case, the head is moved so that it is approaching track zero position of the disk. When a drive with the sensor has reached track zero, the head stops moving immediately and

560-474: A disk, some 3½-inch drives (notably the Macintosh External 400K and 800K drives ) instead use Constant Linear Velocity (CLV), which uses a variable speed drive motor that spins more slowly as the head moves away from the center of the disk, maintaining the same speed of the head(s) relative to the surface(s) of the disk. This allows more sectors to be written to the longer middle and outer tracks as

630-413: A hard-sectored disk, there are many holes, one for each sector row, plus an additional hole in a half-sector position, that is used to indicate sector zero. The Apple II computer system is notable in that it did not have an index hole sensor and ignored the presence of hard or soft sectoring. Instead, it used special repeating data synchronization patterns written to the disk between each sector, to assist

700-420: A loaded disk can be removed manually by inserting a straightened paper clip into a small hole at the drive's front panel, just as one would do with a CD-ROM drive in a similar situation. The X68000 has soft-eject 5¼-inch drives. Some late-generation IBM PS/2 machines had soft-eject 3½-inch disk drives as well for which some issues of DOS (i.e. PC DOS 5.02 and higher) offered an EJECT command. Before

770-557: A recovery. The music and theatre industries still use equipment requiring standard floppy disks (e.g. synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, and lighting consoles ). Industrial automation equipment such as programmable machinery and industrial robots may not have a USB interface; data and programs are then loaded from disks, damageable in industrial environments. This equipment may not be replaced due to cost or requirement for continuous availability; existing software emulation and virtualization do not solve this problem because

SECTION 10

#1732787117056

840-468: A selectable option and purchasable as an aftermarket OEM add-on. By January 2007, only 2% of computers sold in stores contained built-in floppy disk drives. Floppy disks are used for emergency boots in aging systems lacking support for other bootable media and for BIOS updates, since most BIOS and firmware programs can still be executed from bootable floppy disks . If BIOS updates fail or become corrupt, floppy drives can sometimes be used to perform

910-405: A serious problem when the file had to be stored on other computer systems. Those systems, unaware of the fork concept, would have to store the two forks as separate files. This presented the possibility that the two would be separated at some point, or not properly recombined when they were transmitted back to the Mac. This problem led to a number of solutions that combined the two forks together into

980-612: A set of copyfile library functions that allows for packing and unpacking AppleSingle and AppleDouble files in C. MacBinary MacBinary is a file format that combines the data fork and the resource fork of a classic Mac OS file into a single file, along with HFS's extended metadata . The resulting file is suitable for transmission over FTP , the World Wide Web , and electronic mail . The documents can also be stored on computers that run operating systems with no HFS support, such as Unix or Windows . MacBinary

1050-405: A single file, and then automatically pulling them back apart when they reached another Mac. MacBinary was one of the most popular solutions, although BinHex was also used on UseNet , where data transfer was not 8-bit clean . Apple's own solutions, AppleSingle and AppleDouble , were never widely adopted in the user community. Files encoded with MacBinary, regardless of the version, usually have

1120-505: A single hole in the rotating floppy disk medium line up. This mechanism is used to detect the angular start of each track, and whether or not the disk is rotating at the correct speed. Early 8‑inch and 5¼‑inch disks also had holes for each sector in the enclosed magnetic medium, in addition to the index hole, with the same radial distance from the center, for alignment with the same envelope hole. These were termed hard sectored disks. Later soft- sectored disks have only one index hole in

1190-447: A small circle of floppy magnetic material encased in hard plastic. Earlier types of floppy disks did not have this plastic case, which protects the magnetic material from abuse and damage. A sliding metal cover protects the delicate magnetic surface when the diskette is not in use and automatically opens when the diskette is inserted into the computer. The diskette has a square shape: there are apparently eight possible ways to insert it into

1260-411: A small oblong opening in both sides to allow the drive's heads to read and write data and a large hole in the center to allow the magnetic medium to spin by rotating it from its middle hole. Inside the cover are two layers of fabric with the magnetic medium sandwiched in the middle. The fabric is designed to reduce friction between the medium and the outer cover, and catch particles of debris abraded off

1330-475: Is a common source of disk corruption if a disk is changed and the drive (and hence the operating system) fails to notice. One of the chief usability problems of the floppy disk is its vulnerability; even inside a closed plastic housing, the disk medium is highly sensitive to dust, condensation and temperature extremes. As with all magnetic storage , it is vulnerable to magnetic fields. Blank disks have been distributed with an extensive set of warnings, cautioning

1400-456: Is correctly aligned. For a drive without the sensor, the mechanism attempts to move the head the maximum possible number of positions needed to reach track zero, knowing that once this motion is complete, the head will be positioned over track zero. Some drive mechanisms such as the Apple II 5¼-inch drive without a track zero sensor, produce characteristic mechanical noises when trying to move

1470-428: Is still used by software on user-interface elements related to saving files even though physical floppy disks are largely obsolete. Examples of such software include LibreOffice , Microsoft Paint , and WordPad . The 8-inch and 5¼-inch floppy disks contain a magnetically coated round plastic medium with a large circular hole in the center for a drive's spindle. The medium is contained in a square plastic cover that has

SECTION 20

#1732787117056

1540-481: Is stored in AppleDouble format, with the second file having a name generated by prepending "._" to the name of the first file (thus, this information acts as a hidden file when viewed from a non-Apple Unix-based operating system). The files are sometimes moved to a separate directory called .AppleDouble . Metadata separation is also done in the OS X 10.3+ Finder Zip compression and the command line ditto utility, with

1610-551: The Type 1 Diskette in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy". In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the 5¼-inch floppy disk drive. By 1978, there were more than ten manufacturers producing such drives. There were competing floppy disk formats , with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as differential Manchester encoding (DM), modified frequency modulation (MFM), M FM and group coded recording (GCR). The 5¼-inch format displaced

1680-398: The 1990s were non-networked, and floppy disks were the primary means to transfer data between computers, a method known informally as sneakernet . Unlike hard disks, floppy disks were handled and seen; even a novice user could identify a floppy disk. Because of these factors, a picture of a 3½-inch floppy disk became an interface metaphor for saving data. As of 2024 , the floppy disk symbol

1750-469: The 21st century, as a form of skeuomorphic design . While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment , they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater data storage capacity and data transfer speed , such as USB flash drives , memory cards , optical discs , and storage available through local computer networks and cloud storage . The first commercial floppy disks, developed in

1820-527: The 720 KB double density 3½-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and the 1.44 MB (1,474,560 bytes) high-density version with the IBM Personal System/2 (PS/2) line in 1987. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988, Y-E Data introduced a drive for 2.88 MB Double-Sided Extended-Density (DSED) diskettes which was used by IBM in its top-of-the-line PS/2 and some RS/6000 models and in

1890-548: The 8-inch one for most uses, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the 5¼-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB (368,640 bytes) for the Double-Sided Double-Density (DSDD) format using MFM encoding. In 1984, IBM introduced with its PC/AT the 1.2 MB (1,228,800 bytes) dual-sided 5¼-inch floppy disk, but it never became very popular. IBM started using

1960-473: The Sony design, introduced in 1983 by many manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By 1988, the 3½-inch was outselling the 5¼-inch. Generally, the term floppy disk persisted, even though later style floppy disks have a rigid case around an internal floppy disk. By the end of the 1980s, 5¼-inch disks had been superseded by 3½-inch disks. During this time, PCs frequently came equipped with drives of both sizes. By

2030-647: The United States' nuclear forces". The government planned to update some of the technology by the end of the 2017 fiscal year. Use in Japan's government ended in 2024. Windows 10 and Windows 11 no longer come with drivers for floppy disk drives (both internal and external). However, they will still support them with a separate device driver provided by Microsoft. The British Airways Boeing 747-400 fleet, up to its retirement in 2020, used 3½-inch floppy disks to load avionics software. Sony, who had been in

2100-409: The computer in finding and synchronizing with the data in each track. The later 3½-inch drives of the mid-1980s did not use sector index holes, but instead also used synchronization patterns. Most 3½-inch drives used a constant speed drive motor and contain the same number of sectors across all tracks. This is sometimes referred to as Constant Angular Velocity (CAV). In order to fit more data onto

2170-406: The corresponding sensor; this was mainly a hardware cost-saving measure. The core of the 3½-inch disk is the same as the other two disks, but the front has only a label and a small opening for reading and writing data, protected by the shutter—a spring-loaded metal or plastic cover, pushed to the side on entry into the drive. Rather than having a hole in the center, it has a metal hub which mates to

AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats - Misplaced Pages Continue

2240-399: The current is reversed the magnetization aligns in the opposite direction, encoding one bit of data. To read data, the magnetization of the particles in the media induce a tiny voltage in the head coil as they pass under it. This small signal is amplified and sent to the floppy disk controller , which converts the streams of pulses from the media into data, checks it for errors, and sends it to

2310-835: The disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive ( FDD ) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM in 1971, had a disk diameter of 8 inches (203.2 mm). Subsequently, the 5¼-inch (133.35 mm) and then the 3½-inch (88.9 mm) became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare to non-existent. Some individuals and organizations continue to use older equipment to read or transfer data from floppy disks. Floppy disks were so common in late 20th-century culture that many electronic and software programs continue to use save icons that look like floppy disks well into

2380-399: The disk media, an action originally accomplished by a disk-load solenoid. Later drives held the heads out of contact until a front-panel lever was rotated (5¼-inch) or disk insertion was complete (3½-inch). To write data, current is sent through a coil in the head as the media rotates. The head's magnetic field aligns the magnetization of the particles directly below the head on the media. When

2450-442: The disk shell are not quite square: its width is slightly less than its depth, so that it is impossible to insert the disk into a drive slot sideways (i.e. rotated 90 degrees from the correct shutter-first orientation). A diagonal notch at top right ensures that the disk is inserted into the drive in the correct orientation—not upside down or label-end first—and an arrow at top left indicates direction of insertion. The drive usually has

2520-466: The disk to keep them from accumulating on the heads. The cover is usually a one-part sheet, double-folded with flaps glued or spot-welded together. A small notch on the side of the disk identifies whether it is writable, as detected by a mechanical switch or photoelectric sensor . In the 8-inch disk, the notch being covered or not present enables writing, while in the 5¼-inch disk, the notch being present and uncovered enables writing. Tape may be used over

2590-406: The eight ways one might try to insert the diskette, only one is correct, and only that one will fit. An excellent design. A spindle motor in the drive rotates the magnetic medium at a certain speed, while a stepper motor-operated mechanism moves the magnetic read/write heads radially along the surface of the disk. Both read and write operations require the media to be rotating and the head to contact

2660-692: The existing 3½-inch designs was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, using very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 MB and backward-compatibility with standard 3½-inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy-disk products, although ultimately recordable CDs/DVDs, solid-state flash storage, and eventually cloud-based online storage would render all these removable disk formats obsolete. External USB -based floppy disk drives are still available, and many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives. In

2730-547: The file was generally encoded using Base64 , as opposed to being converted to AppleSingle. Before Mac OS X , AppleSingle and Double had little presence in the Mac market, due largely to the small market share of A/UX. Nevertheless, they did force various file compression vendors to add support for the formats, and confuse future MacBinary versions. Mac OS X revived the use of AppleDouble; on file systems such as NFS and WebDAV that do not natively support resource forks, Finder information, or extended attributes, that information

2800-555: The flexibility of floppy disks combined with greater capacity, but remained niche due to costs. High-capacity backward compatible floppy technologies became popular for a while and were sold as an option or even included in standard PCs, but in the long run, their use was limited to professionals and enthusiasts. Flash-based USB thumb drives finally were a practical and popular replacement, that supported traditional file systems and all common usage scenarios of floppy disks. As opposed to other solutions, no new drive type or special software

2870-457: The floppy disk business since 1983, ended domestic sales of all six 3½-inch floppy disk models as of March 2011. This has been viewed by some as the end of the floppy disk. While production of new floppy disk media has ceased, sales and uses of this media from inventories is expected to continue until at least 2026. For more than two decades, the floppy disk was the primary external writable storage device used. Most computing environments before

AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats - Misplaced Pages Continue

2940-512: The general population, floppy disks were often used to store a computer's operating system (OS). Most home computers from that time have an elementary OS and BASIC stored in read-only memory (ROM), with the option of loading a more advanced OS from a floppy disk. By the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were an estimated five billion standard floppy disks in use. An attempt to enhance

3010-431: The greater capacity, compatibility with existing CD-ROM drives, and—with the advent of re-writeable CDs and packet writing—a similar reusability as floppy disks. However, CD-R/RWs remained mostly an archival medium, not a medium for exchanging data or editing files on the medium itself, because there was no common standard for packet writing which allowed for small updates. Other formats, such as magneto-optical discs , had

3080-407: The heads past the reference surface. This physical striking is responsible for the 5¼-inch drive clicking during the boot of an Apple II, and the loud rattles of its DOS and ProDOS when disk errors occurred and track zero synchronization was attempted. All 8-inch and some 5¼-inch drives used a mechanical method to locate sectors, known as either hard sectors or soft sectors , and is the purpose of

3150-450: The host computer system. A blank unformatted diskette has a coating of magnetic oxide with no magnetic order to the particles. During formatting, the magnetizations of the particles are aligned forming tracks, each broken up into sectors , enabling the controller to properly read and write data. The tracks are concentric rings around the center, with spaces between tracks where no data is written; gaps with padding bytes are provided between

3220-499: The late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and both drives and disks were then sold separately starting in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates , and Burroughs Corporation . The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970, and although IBM announced its first media as

3290-424: The machine, only one of which is correct. What happens if I do it wrong? I try inserting the disk sideways. Ah, the designer thought of that. A little study shows that the case really isn't square: it's rectangular, so you can't insert a longer side. I try backward. The diskette goes in only part of the way. Small protrusions, indentations, and cutouts prevent the diskette from being inserted backward or upside down: of

3360-503: The maximum size of any single resource was only 32 kB, far too small for storing document data. To address this, Apple introduced the concept of forks , allowing any file in the filesystem to have both a resource fork and a data fork. Physically these were separate files, but the OS would ensure the two separate files were always treated as a single object, so dragging it to a floppy disk in the Finder would copy both forks. This presented

3430-399: The media. In some 5¼-inch drives, insertion of the disk compresses and locks an ejection spring which partially ejects the disk upon opening the catch or lever. This enables a smaller concave area for the thumb and fingers to grasp the disk during removal. Newer 5¼-inch drives and all 3½-inch drives automatically engage the spindle and heads when a disk is inserted, doing the opposite with

3500-400: The medium, and sector position is determined by the disk controller or low-level software from patterns marking the start of a sector. Generally, the same drives are used to read and write both types of disks, with only the disks and controllers differing. Some operating systems using soft sectors, such as Apple DOS , do not use the index hole, and the drives designed for such systems often lack

3570-493: The mid-1990s, 5¼-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3½-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. The advantages of the 3½-inch disk were its higher capacity, its smaller physical size, and its rigid case which provided better protection from dirt and other environmental risks. Floppy disks became commonplace during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups . Before hard disks became affordable to

SECTION 50

#1732787117056

3640-485: The mid-1990s, mechanically incompatible higher-density floppy disks were introduced, like the Iomega Zip disk . Adoption was limited by the competition between proprietary formats and the need to buy expensive drives for computers where the disks would be used. In some cases, failure in market penetration was exacerbated by the release of higher-capacity versions of the drive and media being not backward-compatible with

3710-526: The notch to change the mode of the disk. Punch devices were sold to convert read-only 5¼" disks to writable ones, and also to enable writing on the unused side of single-sided disks for computers with single-sided drives. The latter worked because single- and double-sided disks typically contained essentially identical actual magnetic media, for manufacturing efficiency. Disks whose obverse and reverse sides were thus used separately in single-sided drives were known as flippy disks . Disk notching 5¼" floppies for PCs

3780-485: The old format, including a rigid case with a sliding metal (or later, sometimes plastic) shutter over the head slot, which helped protect the delicate magnetic medium from dust and damage, and a sliding write protection tab, which was far more convenient than the adhesive tabs used with earlier disks. The large market share of the well-established 5¼-inch format made it difficult for these diverse mutually-incompatible new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on

3850-492: The original drives, dividing the users between new and old adopters. Consumers were wary of making costly investments into unproven and rapidly changing technologies, so none of the technologies became the established standard. Apple introduced the iMac G3 in 1998 with a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive; this made USB-connected floppy drives popular accessories, as the iMac came without any writable removable media device. Recordable CDs were touted as an alternative, because of

3920-409: The press of the eject button. On Apple Macintosh computers with built-in 3½-inch disk drives, the ejection button is replaced by software controlling an ejection motor which only does so when the operating system no longer needs to access the drive. The user could drag the image of the floppy drive to the trash can on the desktop to eject the disk. In the case of a power failure or drive malfunction,

3990-403: The read operation; other errors are permanent and the disk controller will signal a failure to the operating system if multiple attempts to read the data still fail. After a disk is inserted, a catch or lever at the front of the drive is manually lowered to prevent the disk from accidentally emerging, engage the spindle clamping hub, and in two-sided drives, engage the second read/write head with

4060-651: The second-generation NeXTcube and NeXTstation ; however, this format had limited market success due to lack of standards and movement to 1.44 MB drives. Throughout the early 1980s, limits of the 5¼-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be more practical than the 8-inch format, it was becoming considered too large; as the quality of recording media grew, data could be stored in a smaller area. Several solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, 2½-, 3-, 3¼-, 3½- and 4-inches (and Sony 's 90 mm × 94 mm (3.54 in × 3.70 in) disk) offered by various companies. They all had several advantages over

4130-502: The sectors and at the end of the track to allow for slight speed variations in the disk drive, and to permit better interoperability with disk drives connected to other similar systems. Each sector of data has a header that identifies the sector location on the disk. A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is written into the sector headers and at the end of the user data so that the disk controller can detect potential errors. Some errors are soft and can be resolved by automatically re-trying

4200-413: The small hole in the jacket, off to the side of the spindle hole. A light beam sensor detects when a punched hole in the disk is visible through the hole in the jacket. For a soft-sectored disk, there is only a single hole, which is used to locate the first sector of each track. Clock timing is then used to find the other sectors behind it, which requires precise speed regulation of the drive motor. For

4270-408: The spindle of the drive. Typical 3½-inch disk magnetic coating materials are: Two holes at the bottom left and right indicate whether the disk is write-protected and whether it is high-density; these holes are spaced as far apart as the holes in punched A4 paper, allowing write-protected high-density floppy disks to be clipped into international standard ( ISO 838 ) ring binders . The dimensions of

SECTION 60

#1732787117056

4340-442: The user not to expose it to dangerous conditions. Rough treatment or removing the disk from the drive while the magnetic media is still spinning is likely to cause damage to the disk, drive head, or stored data. On the other hand, the 3½‑inch floppy disk has been lauded for its mechanical usability by human–computer interaction expert Donald Norman : A simple example of a good design is the 3½-inch magnetic diskette for computers,

4410-409: Was generally only required where users wanted to overwrite original 5¼" disks of store-bought software, which somewhat commonly shipped with no notch present. Another LED/photo-transistor pair located near the center of the disk detects the index hole once per rotation in the magnetic disk. Detection occurs whenever the drive's sensor, the holes in the correctly inserted floppy's plastic envelope and

4480-465: Was later assigned the MIME type application/applefile . AppleDouble leaves the data fork in its original format, allowing it to be edited by normal Unix utilities. The resource fork and Finder information, both proprietary and lacking editors under Unix, were combined into a second file. A MIME type was also assigned to AppleDouble, multipart/appledouble . For sending to an AppleDouble un-aware system,

4550-468: Was little financial incentive to omit the device from a system. Subsequently, enabled by the widespread support for USB flash drives and BIOS boot, manufacturers and retailers progressively reduced the availability of floppy disk drives as standard equipment. In February 2003, Dell , one of the leading personal computer vendors, announced that floppy drives would no longer be pre-installed on Dell Dimension home computers, although they were still available as

4620-421: Was not used on Mac OS X , and MacBinary has largely disappeared. In contrast to other computers of the era, Macintosh applications included both computer code as well as a large number of resources that were used by the operating system (OS) itself. These resources were also widely used in documents to store rich media like sounds and images. However, the resource system had the significant limitation that

4690-519: Was released in 1985. The standard was originally specified by Dennis Brothers (author of the terminal program MacTEP and later an Apple employee), BinHex author Yves Lempereur, PackIt author Harry Chesley, et al. then added support for MacBinary into BinHex 5.0, using MacBinary to combine the forks instead of his own methods. Most terminal programs and internet utilities added built-in MacBinary support during this period as well. Two years later it

4760-443: Was required that impeded adoption, since all that was necessary was an already common USB port . By 2002, most manufacturers still provided floppy disk drives as standard equipment to meet user demand for file-transfer and an emergency boot device, as well as for the general secure feeling of having the familiar device. By this time, the retail cost of a floppy drive had fallen to around $ 20 (equivalent to $ 34 in 2023), so there

4830-627: Was updated to MacBinary II , to accommodate changes in Mac OS. MacBinary II remained compatible with subsequent updates of the operating system for some time. This changed with the release of Mac OS 8 , which necessitated the release of MacBinary III in 1996. In the meantime, Apple itself had released the AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats, which serve the same purpose as MacBinary, but correct some problems with it. Floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as

4900-517: Was widely supported on the Macintosh and was built into most communications programs on that platform. Similar solutions were built into most data compression applications on the Mac, and although these did not require MacBinary to survive transmission across non-Mac systems, MacBinary was often added in these cases to preserve longer filenames and other features. The dual-fork nature of the HFS system

#55944