The monochrome glory of the command prompt now awaits, this my dear readers was the only way to operate computers before the launch of the Apple Macintosh which itself led to the likes of GEM, Windows, Gnome and many other windows based interfaces we take for granted today.

If you have never opened a command prompt window before and don't know where to start, click on the START button (The round windows logo in Windows Vista and Windows 7) and in the Run box at the bottom, type cmd then press return. So long as you know what format you want on your disk you have always been able to format whatever you wanted to from the DOS prompt, and the same is true today from the newer Windows Command Line. One thing that Microsoft never quite moved away from, and is actually moving back towards in the server products, is the command line, and one of the commands that has pretty much stayed the same since the days of DOS is the format command. With Windows Vista and Windows 7, the situation remains, though now there is the threat on the horizon to remove support for the floppy disk altogether.īut for the moment, despite rumblings from Microsoft saying otherise, it is possible to format floppy disks for the Atari to use, you just have to know how. As it turned out you could still write data, but all formatting options wre removed, so unless you had a program on the ST that would format to PC standards, or a later version of TOS, you had to sacrifice a disk that you knew the PC would read to get information to your platform of choice.

With the launch of Windows XP, it was announced that while XP would read 720K floppy disks, formatting and writing to them was not supported. But while floppy disks are still available and most floppy drives will read them, many newer operating systems no longer format 720K disks and support is slowly dwindling. The humble floppy disk has powered the Amiga family, Atari ST family, and its successors for years, providing file storage and programs for countless people, along with the ability to move files long before the invention, never mind adoption of USB flash drives. 35_inch_floppy_disks.jpg (11.21 KiB) Viewed 3129 times

Amiga floppy disk format