Answer 1—The first generation of 8² floppy disk drives had 77 tracks of 26 sectors, with 128 bytes per sector, for a total capacity of 256,256 bytes (250 KB). CP/M systems using these drives reserved the first two tracks (6.5 KB) for the operating system (bootloader, BIOS, BDOS, and CCP). The remaining storage was allocated eight sectors (1 KB) at a time (wasting the last six sectors) and the directory usually used the first two allocation units (64 entries of 32 bytes each), leaving 241 KB for user storage.

Contributor: David Tweed