Moe Trin wrote:
> In the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.suse, in article
> <dcho1i$25pv$1@godfrey.mcc.ac.uk>, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>>I probably need to understand magnetic storage a little better. I have
>>always taken it for granted.
>
> Toroids, tapes, platters, bubbles... They're all magnetic media, but
> their setup procedures would vary. And yes, I did work with a system
> that used toroids - the original definition of "core". Had a whole 2k
> of 16 bit words.
>
>>This predates my days of computer use, I am fairly sure. However, I
>>remember being intorduced to a hard-drive in my friend's house (I think it
>>was 40 MB). My first hard-drive was 170 MB in capacity.
>
> My first hard drive _at home_ was a 15 Meg Seagate. At work... I dunno,
> there was a 14 inch platter in a plastic holder that held all of 1.2
> megabyte - the same as a 5.25 inch high density floppy from 1984.
>
>>I can only recall nc.exe as well as ndd.exe, which I used several years
>>afterwards.
>
> The was version 6.
>
>>I have always wondered why undelete.exe wanted the first letter
>>as user input, but realised and speculated this had a good motive.
>
> When DOS deletes the file, it changed the first character of the filename
> in the directory table to 0xE5. DOS uses that value to indicate that the
> file has been erased, and to not show it in a directory listing.
You have answered a question that has plagued my mind since I was very
young. Isn't that an inefficient filesystem implementation though? No
wonder they disposed of it (so I assume).
>>I think that Windows 95 still had a front-end and filesystem support for
>>undelete.
>
> I stopped working with DOS in 1992. I _thought_ that win95 adopted the
> Macintosh trashcan, but that's only a guess.
I read an article yesterday about the Apple Lisa potentially imitating the
Xerox look-and-feel. No doubt Bill Gates was imitating many features of the
Mac. Even Windows Vista is trying to keep up with Tiger by imitation.
I know this comes out of the blue, but I think it is very, very relevant to
our discussion and it was posted in Slashdot later yesterday:
http://www.geoffreyhuntley.com/news/data-security-101/
Be patient. The images might take a while to load because of the "Slashdot
effect".
[snip]
Early last week eighteen IBM RS/6000 E20 servers went up for sale at a
government auction for ~$20 AUD a server, anyway after a couple days they
were delivered and I began the daunting task of certifying all of the
hardware in the servers.
When the first server was turned on, it booted all the way to the standard
AIX login prompt. It was later discovered that the root (master account)
password was indeed set to root.
...
Keep in mind that these servers came from the State Transit Authority of
NSW, how is it possible and acceptable in this day of age that governmental
servers be decommissioned and sold without wiping the contents of the
drives?
[/snip]
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com
|
|
