🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <21...@unix.cis.pitt.edu> m...@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Matt S Wartell) writes:
>Floppies certainly have become more reliable over the years.
> 
>Having had a TRS-80 Model I computer (serial number 732) taught
>me a bit about the reliability of early consumer floppies.
>These were 5.25'' soft-sector floppies that stored a whopping
>80k.  After acquiring our disk drives, we quickly learned that
>powering the drive off would irretrievably erase the contents of any
>loaded floppy.   Sneezing in the same room as the machine seemed to have
>a similar adverse effect.

Actually, the disks themselves were *reasonably* reliable media, as I
remember.  It was the TRaSh-80 that was unreliable -- or, more specifically,
TRaSh-DOS and the disk drives themselves.  Power cycling the disk drive with a
diskette loaded would pretty reliably glitch the disk, probably trashing the
directory or the GAT (Granule Allocation Table, sort of the same thing as the
MS-DOS FAT), because that's where the heads were likely to be.  Most of the
time, these things were recoverable using a program called Superzap, which
allowed you to go munging about in the innards of the disk directories and so
forth.

Often, you didn't need to do anything to cause TRaSh-DOS to have your file
system (that's a joke!  File system?  Har!) for lunch.  It had some *very*
nasty bugs.

>[I can't believe I publicly admitted to having a TRS]

I can't believe it myself! :-)

							spl (the p stands for
							programming on a
							TRS-80 is like a fish
							without a bicycle)
-- 
Steve Lamont, sciViGuy			EMail:	s...@ncsc.org
NCSC, Box 12732, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
"Reality involves a square root"
			Thomas Palmer