On Thu, 11 Jul 2024 at 12:00, Radoslaw Skorupka < [email protected]> wrote:
> I just found information in some book that IBM mainframes used 12 inch > floppy diskettes. Late 70's. > > Anybody heard about such diskettes? > No, and they almost certainly never existed. Well perhaps in a lab somewhere, but every wacky thing was in some lab at some point, but was never shipped to a customer. There is a remarkable amount of carelessness in a remarkable number of technical/historical books. Some of it can be excused because the authors were not "there" at the time, and are writing history from today's perspective. But a lot is just laziness and lack of fact checking. We can see this kind of thing already developing in this short email conversation, where some people just jumped on to say oh yes, "they" were used in the IBM xxxx, but either didn't read carefully or didn't care enough, and they were agreeing with "8 inch" floppies. Not blaming anyone, but that's how these things happen. Now when some AI picks it up as training data it will happily halucinate a 12 inch floppy into existence. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
