Article 42787 of comp.sys.amiga.programmer:
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From: brianr@tekig1.PEN.TEK.COM (Brian E Rhodefer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Why can't MS-DOS recogn. Amiga disks?
Message-ID: <13134@tekig7.PEN.TEK.COM>
Date: 9 Jan 94 22:22:57 GMT
Article-I.D.: tekig7.13134
References: <1994Jan9.001139.19591@dal1>
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Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
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In article <1994Jan9.001139.19591@dal1> jtee@ac.dal.ca writes:
>
>	Just curious:  there are many programs out there that
>allow the Amiga disk drives to detect and read from/write to
>PC disks.  This lets users who only have ftp access through a PC,
>to bring files home on 720K disks and to copy them onto the
>Amiga disks.  Since this is possible, wouldn't it be possible
>for someone to write an MS-DOS executable program that 
>recognizes Amiga disks and will allow one to write files to it?
>

No.  The analogy doesn't hold up.  It's like reasoning that
because you and I can understand one another when we converse
in English, I can speak any language that you can.

The Amiga's hardware designers couldn't be bothered with adding
a jellybean floppy disk controller IC; they wanted the ultimate
in low cost, so they figured out a way to handle floppy disk
reading and writing that involved using the graphics blitter (!!!)
to do the encoding/decoding of "raw" magnetic flux transitions.

This produced a very flexible floppy disk system.  It can change
physical recording formats under program control, and CBM exploited
that flexibility by deciding to forget about dividing floppy disk
tracks up into sectors.  Amigas read and write entire tracks at a
time, and "sector-ize" them purely in memory.  Worse still: just as
the Amiga's serial transceiver doesn't pay any attention to the modem
handshaking signals (I'm talking about hardware here), neither does the
Amiga's floppy drive system take much notice of the floppy disk index pulse.

The IBM and clone designers, on the other hand, have this silly
idea that an equally economical solution can be had by going
ahead and using the jellybean parts, on the grounds that they
sell in such huge volumes.  So IBM boxes all use industry-standardized
floppy disk controller ICs.  And those ICs are "hardwired" to expect
things like inter-sector record gaps, consistent physical location
of all sectors on the disk, etc.  They don't seem to be capable of
writing entire tracks at once, so they can't write AmigaDOS format disks.

Brian Rhodefer