I am pretty sure it was 100 six-bit characters plus a parity bit and a stop bit, so the recorded character was indeed 1 byte but to say it was 100 bytes that would be like adding the formatting, ECC and header to the 512 or 4 KiB industry standard sector. Many do, I don’t 😊
Tom -----Original Message----- From: Fred Cisin <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2026 1:35 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <[email protected]> Subject: [cctalk] Re: Some small corrections RE: Ramac : The real first disk drive? and RE: Floppy disk On Thu, 11 Jun 2026, Tom Gardner via cctalk wrote: > “Ramac had fifty 2 foot diameter double sided platters, and could hold > a total of about 5MB.' > • The IBM 350 disk storage capacity was 5 million 6-bit characters == > 3.75 MB. Thank you, I couldn't remember how many bytes per track to calculate accurately. They might not have been multiples of 128? Long, long ago, I was told 100 bytes per sector?
