Distribution Media Format (DMF) is a
format for
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
s that
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
used to distribute
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
.
It allowed the disk to contain 1680
KiB of data on a 3-inch disk, instead of the standard 1440
KiB. As a side effect, utilities had to specially support the format in order to read and write the disks, which made
copying
Copying is the duplication of information or an wiktionary:artifact, artifact based on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. With Analog device, analog forms of information, copying is ...
of products distributed on this
medium
Medium may refer to:
Aircraft
*Medium bomber, a class of warplane
* Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''The Medium'' (1921 film), a German silent film
* ''The Medium'' (1951 film), a film vers ...
more difficult. An Apple Macintosh computer running
Disk Copy 6.3.3 on the Mac OS 7.6 or later operating system can copy and make DMF disks.
The first Microsoft software product that uses DMF for distribution were the "c" revisions of Office 4.x. It also was the first software product to use
CAB files, then called "Diamond".
Comparison of DMF and standard 1440 KiB 3-inch diskettes:
DMF in the form of a 1680 KiB
Virtual Floppy Disk (VFD) image and
IBM Extended Density Format (XDF) images are supported by
Windows Virtual PC
Virtual PC is a discontinued x86 emulator software for Microsoft Windows hosts and PowerPC-based Mac hosts. It was created by Connectix in 1997 and acquired by Microsoft in 2003, after which the program was renamed Microsoft Virtual PC. In ...
.
See also
*
fdformat, a DOS program that allows the formatting of high-capacity floppy disks
*
HDCopy, a DOS program that can read and write floppy disk and disk images in multiple formats, including DMF
*
IBM Extended Density Format (XDF), a high-density diskette format used by IBM
References
{{Reflist, refs=
[{{cite web , url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120348 , title=Definition of Distribution Media Format (DMF) , publisher=]Microsoft Knowledge Base Microsoft Knowledge Base (MSKB) was a website repository of over 150,000 articles made available to the public by Microsoft Corporation for technical support. It contained information on many problems encountered by users of Microsoft products. Each ...
, date=2007-01-19 , access-date=2011-10-16 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110914232540/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120348 , archive-date=2011-09-14 , url-status=dead
[{{cite book , url=https://archive.org/details/winnlroschhardwa00rosc_0 , title=Floppy Disks , work=Hardware Bible 1997
, author-first=Winn L. , author-last=Rosch , isbn=0-672-30954-8 , publisher= SAMS Publishing , date=1997-04-18 , quote=... reducing the inter-record gap (the space between sectors) down to nine bytes ... Each track uses a 2:1 interleave factor ... The DMF format also skews the sectors on adjacent tracks by three sectors ... , access-date=2011-10-16 , url-access=registration]
[{{cite web , url=http://www.macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=23402 , title=Disk Copy 6.3.3 , publisher= Apple Computer, Inc. , date=1999 , access-date=2016-04-27]
[{{cite web , author-last=Armstrong , author-first=Ben , title=Floppy disk image formats supported by Virtual PC and Virtual Server , url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/01/04/floppy-disk-image-formats-supported-by-virtual-pc-and-virtual-server.aspx , work=Virtual PC Guy's Blog , publisher=]Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
, access-date=2011-10-16 , date=2007-01-05 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170826193600/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/virtual_pc_guy/2007/01/04/floppy-disk-image-formats-supported-by-virtual-pc-and-virtual-server/
, archive-date=2017-08-26 , url-status=dead
External links
About DMF
Floppy disk computer storage
Microsoft