On Mar 8, 2018, at 12:14 PM, Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
It's actually funny seeing the different perspectives from people who had to deal with what is now our vintage computers! I always wondered why the Macs could read Mac or Windows formatted disks right out of the box but windows choked on anything but it's own format, and needed special drivers etc to read both (and often to even recognize its own hardware!)
It's purely a market incentive thing. To survive in a PC-dominated world, Apple had to make the Mac OS read PC disks. Microsoft, IBM and all the rest never had a financial incentive to do so, and because it would have required additional hardware to read GCR disks, it was never really going to happen. Interestingly, the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) chip used in early Macs and the Apple IIc and beyond wasn't much more than a single-chip version of the Disk II controller and could only handle GCR (400/800k) formatting, so early Macs can't read PC disks. The SWIM chip introduced in the Mac II/SE FDHD line added PC-compatible MFM formatting, used for 360k/720k/1.44M disks. The ISM (Integrated Sanders Machine) used to read both GCR and MFM formats with the same state machine is a real work of art; read the docs some time (I have copies here that I should really upload to The Archive). So Mac formatted HD floppies use the same low-level formatting as PC floppies, which means PCs are actually able to read them, but because there's no HFS filesystem driver included in Windows, the ability to do that was left to a rather niche third-party market (the small amount of sales those drivers saw tells you all you need to know about how right Microsoft was not to spend time implementing it).
I never understood why people wouldn't just ask what format the printshop or whatever could accept (they'd assume it would "just work" like it did in their home or office) and why so many businesses (not all, but many I remember dealing with and even some still to this day!) didn't specify when initially dealing with a client what the client had vs what they had.
You're assuming people who deal with printing understand filesystems. We still have the same problem with USB drives. Responding to Anthony's question about why anyone would ever format portable media to Mac format, well, there are two reasons: 1) because Apple's filesystems are built for its operating systems, they work better (for example, it took forever before anything other than 8.3 filenames worked on DOS disks on Mac OS, and there's metadata that the Mac uses that just isn't supported on other filesystems), and 2) when you format a disk in a system, the native format is usually the default. But yes, you can specify ahead of time what format things need to be, but in my experience in retail and consulting, the paper you write those instructions on is probably put to better use by stacking it near the toilet. Customers don't read that stuff, and if they do, they don't always understand or remember. - Dave