From: joemonk64@gmail.com   
      
   On Friday, April 22, 2022 at 7:33:31 AM UTC-5, muta...@gmail.com wrote:   
   > I vaguely recall (from circa 1990) configuring my BIOS   
   > to say what cylinders/heads/sectors I wanted my hard   
   > disk to be.   
   >   
   > Why was the end user involved in doing that?   
   >   
   > Thanks. Paul.   
      
   Well, if you remember, there were three proprietary standards back then ...   
   MFM, RLL, and ESDI.   
      
   They all used different low level formats.   
      
   So, the BIOS was involved in translation from the proprietary format to the   
   DOS standard format. Since the bios had no clue of the actual format,  you had   
   to tell it the translation parameters.   
      
   Joe   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)