Comment by b112

Well it depends when it was claimed.

I imagine MFM drives from 1985 might be a bit different from drives that are billions of times more data dense today. Back then, the drive didn't even control track width, the controller card did. And it was exposed to the OS.

I remember turning my "20MB", yes MB drive into a 30MB drive by messing with the track width. Of course, this was the time when people had Commodore 64 300baud modems, and would overclock them and get 450baud out of them.

In my computer club, we wrote a little piece of software to see which of us could get the highest bandwidth on a modem, one was even capable of just over 500baud!

After ranking, we all agreed to "trade down", so the guy with the fastest modem swapped his with the owner of the local Punter BBS. Everyone else traded so we still had the same ranking. That way, the BBS would always be able to support everyone at max speed, and everyone would still be "lucky" in terms of "next fastest modem".

I can't imagine that happening today.