Skew vs. interleave

Mike Stein mhs.stein at gmail.com
Fri Jul 30 16:35:10 CDT 2021


There's a small discussion on S100computers about the terms 'skew' and
'interleave'.

In CP/M documentation 'skew' refers to what's usually called interleave
these days, i.e. offsetting sectors on a track to compensate for the fact
that by the time the computer has processed a given sector the next one has
already passed by, so that the computer has to wait an entire revolution
for it to pass by the head again; in other documentation as in Chuck's
22disk for example this is also called 'interleave'.

However, in later documentation the meaning of 'skew' seems to have changed
to refer to the offset of sectors between adjacent tracks to compensate for
the time required to step the head.

Can anyone (Fred, Chuck?) shed some light on this apparent double meaning
of 'skew'? And if skew was used to describe sector interleave then what was
the offsetting of sectors between tracks called?

Inquiring minds need to know ;-)

m


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