🚀 go-pugleaf

I am curious about the bootsector, and it is clear that George
Woodside, the author of BOOTSEC, PENICILN, and CHKFMT knows a lot more
than I do.  ( Thanks, George ).  I tried BOOTSEC on a freshly
formatted disk, and found a serial number that changed after I
formatted the disk again.  Then I tried PENICILN on the same disk.  I
used the command

	peniciln -m a

to write an MS-DOS compatible boot sector.  I noticed that the serial
number was

	3354162,

and I thought that I had seen that one before.  Well, almost.  What I
was remembering was the number produced by IBMFMT.  The program IBMFMT,
posted to this net some time ago, always gives the serial number

	3354163.

There has been some discussion about the importance of disks having
distinct serial numbers, and I guess that our built in formatting
program gives us this, almost always, assuming that the generated
serial number really is random.

What does MS-DOS do about serial numbers?

Does it matter to DOS or MS-DOS if they (serial numbers)
are all the same?

What "harm" will come to a TOS user ( me :-) ) who has
several disks with the same serial number?