Speaking of WinImage, if you've used a few emulators (or probably even if you've just used floppies on a PC at all) you've probably seen this message.

Gilles is the author of WinImage of course, but you ever wonder who C.H. Hochstatter was?

The origins of this bootsector come from a tool called FDFORMAT, by Christopher H. Hockstätter.

Here's the manual:
https://retrocmp.de/software/fdformat/fdformat.pdf
And the program:
https://retrocmp.de/dwnld/fdform18.zip

Here's the interesting part:

This program must not be sold for profit. An adaequate<sic> fee may be
requested for copying, shipping and handling when redistributing this
program.

Now, the boot sector used by FDFORMAT was included as "FDBOOT.ASM". It's not, technically, part of the "FDFORMAT" program, but I'm not sure how well that argument would have held up legally...

The boot sector shows up in other products too, like UltraISO. I just hope that he got proper compensation for it.

At least his name has become more famous than his original program ever was...

Oh hey, would you look at that, Christopher has a Github and it's all up there now.

This is like going on a little journey that takes you through the countryside and then ends at a Walmart. But there you go.

https://github.com/christoh/fdformat

@gloriouscow
I have many disks with FDFormat's format. I did not know WinImage or emulators could handle it.

I abused it when I had a 486, but it revealed to be a problematic format for IDE floppy drives (100 Mb LS magneto-optic drives).

Slackware 2.4 could read them, but I'm not sure SuSE 9 could read them (most of the time I used SuSE 9 I had an LS, though). I don't know if MTools floppy utilities can read it in a "modern" system.

I did not use FDFormat to format these disks, instead I used AgSI, a system info application that credited Christoff Hotstatter.

I found FDFormat git last year and I wanted to re-compile it but I lacked time or expertize.