Re: PC file Layouts ??

[Peter Coffin <phcoffin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Don writes:

> DIF (Data Interchange Format) is, I believe, a standard introduced by Lotus.
In
> any event, it's also easy to use.

DIF has been around since the days of VisiCalc, predating 1-2-3 by a while.

But it *is* pretty easy to use. The only reason it didn't become a standard file
format for spreadsheet programs is that it's frothy (non-dense), printable
format,
and it took a lot of storage (in an age of 140k floppy disks as main disk) in
comparison to a binary format. DIF files were about 160% of the size of the same
spreadsheet stored in a native format, IIRC.

Peter H. Coffin
phcoffin@us.ibm.com
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