On Sun, 25 Jan 1998, John Wilson wrote:

> But it gave the same size for both disks and tapes -- surely they were
> referring to the *height* of the 19" box?  10.5" is standard for all the
> older rackmount disks and many tapes.

Hey, you're right!  :-)  I've just assumed it meant that the platters
are 10.5" in diameter, but now that you point it out, it's obvious!  I
was wondering why the heck they bothered to mention the diameter of the
platters at all, when they're hidden inside -- and if I'd thought about
it some more, it should have occured to me that they're larger than that
anyway.  (I've taken a broken one apart once just out of curiosity.)

> (I'm assuming that the non-ASCII
> character you're using refers to "1/2" in your character set.)

Yup.  Sorry about that<rant> -- but really, these days, ISO 8859-1,
clearly marked as such with MIME headers, should be acceptable globally. 
It's the standard character set in the entire western hemisphere; it's
the lower 256 positions of UNICODE (as seen in Redmond and the far
east); and the entire non-English speaking world has to worry about
character sets just to type in their own languages anyway, so they need
to have conformant systems operative to begin with</rant>.

-tih (whose native language contains three non-ASCII characters)
-- 
Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity.  --Niles Crane, "Frasier"