Q1 Disks
Q1 floppy disks
Not all of the information on this page has been verified. Especially provenance of disks and their association to specific Q1 models.
A number of original Q1 floppy disks have been digitised using FloppyTools.
These originate from three different sources
- 1 disk with DDF
- 23 disks from Mattis Lind distributed in three cardboard cases (red, green white) originating with a Q1 Microlite
- 182 disks from Mattis Lind from a large moving box originating from a Q1 LMC
Classification
We have used the AutoArchaeologist to examine these disks.
The classification is largely based on record sizes and manual 'sampling' of individual disks and files.
Executable programs
These are primarily identified by a record size of 255 and consist of a sequence of (marker, address, length, data) blocks.
Most executable programs can be run by simply typing the filename and providing any optional arguments.
However not all 255 byte record files are directly executable. For example PL1LIB seems to be an object file that can be loaded and executed only by a running program. Finally there might be files conmtaining other data (forms, text, ...) that happen to use the 255 byte record size.
List of (mostly) executable programs
PL/I source code
These are primarily identified by a record size of 79 although it looks like this is primarily a matter of convention as we have seen a PL/I program with record length 80.
Disk directory
Track zero on every disk is a file named INDEX. It has a fixed record size (40) and describes the size and format of all files on that disk. All INDEX files have a record size of 40 but some files of size 40 contain other data.
Files with 40 byte records (238)
Text documents
Q1 was used for text processing. A record size of 462 bytes seems to have been used for this as quoted from the text editing manual:
A track is about 2 densely packed pages. When the system asks the record length, answer 462.
This is not something we have explored a lot but here is a list of text documents we have found.
List of (mostly) text documents (reclen=462
Identified word processing files
Q1 WORD PROCESSING REFERENCE MANUAL by Richard M. Smets
Cover letter for Q1 LMC 8x37 chars
Quotation for using Q1 for options analysis
Letters (informal/private)
Thank-you letter to Hässelby Strands Båtklubb
H. STENHARDT AB
Incorporation document for 'H. STENHARDT AB
Curious documents
One can only wonder how this document found its way onto these disks: