This Standard, ECMA-33 describes the recording format for use with the 6 Disk Pack defined in Standard ECMA-32.
No attempt is made to solve problems of data and file structure standardization as the standard restricts itself to definition of gaps and hardware detected codes.
The format chosen is a variable data length type, which is already in general use in the computer industry at the time of writing this standard. Therefore, this standard serves to quantify current practice and places an equal responsibility on all manufacturers to meet the same requirements for interchange.
This format is designed to handle eight bit characters (bytes). However, in this standard the Standard ECMA-6 for a 7 Bit Coded Character Set is specified, with each seven bit character occupying one byte position.
It should be noted that in this standard, plain binary numbers in eight bit bytes, are used in the control fields to define the lengths of the variable fields in terms of numbers of bytes.