Kevin Nathan wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 03:01:36 +0100
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
>
>> I have always believed that when formatting a floppy disk, going
>> through the sectors involved stuffing them with arbitrary bits or
>> just zeros.
>
> Actually, hex F6 for the nigglers amongst us . . . :-)
I don't think in hex anymore. Hardware professionals need to be better
orientated in hex, as I too had to be when I worked on an ARM debugger:
http://www.schestowitz.com/Projects/kmdupdate.html
> I once wrote an assembler routine to wipe the bubble memory (and/or hard
> drives) for a military group back when I was still in the Navy. I was
> never told if it was used, or not, but it took eight hours on a 5 MB
> hard drive. Since I never actually had access to the boxes with
> bubble memory, I have no idea how long it took to run on them,
> but 640KB of main memory took about 20 minutes (4.77MHz clock on
> an 8088) . . . ;-)
Judging by the size of the main memory, the machines were probably 386 with
or without a hard-drive which contained no more than 400 MB of data. So, I
guess your algorithm was sufficiently useful. *smile*
Anon1: What do you do for a living?
Anon2: I build houses for people.
Anon1: And what do _you_ do for a living?
Anon3: I demolish houses.
Anon1: Kevin, what did _you_ do for a living?
Kevin: I help people destroy data.
Just a joke anyway...
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com
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