Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mailrus!ames!ncar!tank!eecae!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!chaim
From: chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Chaim  Dworkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec.micro
Subject: Format Pro-350 disks
Keywords: format, Pro-350, disks
Message-ID: <14810@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 28 Sep 89 00:59:22 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: chaim@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Chaim  Dworkin)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 20

I've been using Pro-350s since around 1983 and swearing at what a stupid
computer it is up until the past few months.  I recently upgraded to 
P/OS 3.1 and from reading this newsgroup am gaining a new appreciation
of what appears to be a very sluggish computer with a weird OS.
I have been told that DEC didn't want it to compete with the PDP11 so 
they put lots of wait states in the operating system.  I don't know if
that's true but it looks slow enough to have at least a few thousand 
wait states to me  :^)

Anyway, one thing which has always bothered me is that there is no format
program which will allow you to take a generic 96tpi disk and initialize
it on the Pro.  You are locked in to buying RX50s.  Over the summer I
made an interesting discovery.  If you buy a generic 96 tpi diskette
and format it in a Rainbow using the FORMAT /i command, it will create a
formatted diskette which can then be put into a Pro-350 and initialized.

Has anyone tried this?  Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something safe
or am I liable to find lost data sometime in the future???

Chaim