reading legacy floppy disks

[James Knott]

Mel Wilson wrote:
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 07:27:42AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
>>> When I took C at George Brown College in 1995, we could use 3.5"
>>> floppies.  However, in class we used Turbo C on Windows 3.1, while at
>>> home I used Borland C on OS/2, so I had to be careful about variable
>>> sizes.  For example an int was 16 bits in Borland C, but only 8 in
>>> Turbo.  On occasion, my code would work fine at home, but crap out in
>>> class because I'd overflowed a variable.
>>
>> Don't 8 bit integers violate the C standard?  I thought it required
>> integer to be at least 16 bits.
> 
> This recollection is rather strange.  I'd been using Turbo C
> since 1986 or so, and remember only 16-bit ints.  My version ran
> on a PC clone with 8088, so 16-bits was a normal size.
> In 1995 Turbo C 2.0 was my preferred small language, for writing
> little one-off utilities and the like.  No hint of anything so
> non-standard.

In retrospect, I could be wrong on that, as it was 11 year ago. 
Regardless, the integer in Borland C on OS/2 was twice as wide as on DOS 
Turbo C, so it may have been 32 vs 16 bits.  I haven't looked at either 
compiler in years.

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