I was there Gandalf, three thousand year ago when we invented write cache and the strength of men failed. After that we needed to ask the computer for permission to turn it off, instead of just killing it like we are supposed to.
Although I was old enough to have had spinning rust hard drives that didn’t park their heads automatically when losing power. You would have to issue a park command manually to get the drive to park the heads. That way when the computer was sitting there powered off, the heads would be secure and not at risk of damaging themselves or the platter when the power resumed and the disk spun up again. The risk was minimal, but with prices the way they were back then, we always took care to park the heads. And when auto parking was a thing, it was such muscle memory, it took a long time to unlearn.
Right with ya! My gf and I went to the library to load up on utilities. Disk park, zip program, etc.
One time the CMOS battery died and wiped the BIOS. We found a local IBM engineering office, not for the public, and begged a guy to copy the BIOS to a 3.5". He acted like Neo, all secretive, “If you get caught with this…” “We know, didn’t get it from you.” Weird.
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I was there Gandalf, three thousand year ago when we invented write cache and the strength of men failed. After that we needed to ask the computer for permission to turn it off, instead of just killing it like we are supposed to.
Although I was old enough to have had spinning rust hard drives that didn’t park their heads automatically when losing power. You would have to issue a park command manually to get the drive to park the heads. That way when the computer was sitting there powered off, the heads would be secure and not at risk of damaging themselves or the platter when the power resumed and the disk spun up again. The risk was minimal, but with prices the way they were back then, we always took care to park the heads. And when auto parking was a thing, it was such muscle memory, it took a long time to unlearn.
Right with ya! My gf and I went to the library to load up on utilities. Disk park, zip program, etc.
One time the CMOS battery died and wiped the BIOS. We found a local IBM engineering office, not for the public, and begged a guy to copy the BIOS to a 3.5". He acted like Neo, all secretive, “If you get caught with this…” “We know, didn’t get it from you.” Weird.