15 Nov
2007
15 Nov
'07
9:16 a.m.
And thusly were the wise words spake by Roy J. Tellason
On Tuesday 13 November 2007 18:17, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
This reminds me of one particular disk-copying program, which would have the
lights on both drives on solid. You could, once you'd kicked off a copying
process, have unplugged the computer and it would just keep on going.
I believe there were a few disk-copying programs like this that would
also prompt you to change disks by flashing the LEDs in some way.
Cheers,
Bryan
An even
better example is the C-64. The disk drives on that are
netoriously slow, but were computers in their own right, having a CPU as
part of the drive electronics. One trick (assuming you have at least two
disk drives) was to program the disk drives to copy a disk,
The 64 was emblematic of the best and worst features of this. The
intelligent serial peripherals could talk amongst each other, such as
the disk drive becoming commanded to TALK and the printer to LISTEN,
which is essentially a print spooler.