3 ms·
Not necessarily. Sometimes you are forced to lie, because another component couldn't bear the truth. Disks were an example of that basically from day 1. I can't
by rollcat 3y ago
Not necessarily. Sometimes you are forced to lie, because another component couldn't bear the truth. Disks were an example of that basically from day 1. I can't recall the exact details, but it was something about the disk geometry (heads/cylinders/sectors) that didn't fit in an 8bit integer, which was what BIOS expected. So the disks had to make something up, and translate requests on the go, otherwise a chunk of the total capacity would be inaccessible, which would be inexcusable in a race to be the biggest.
You could call it "adversarial compatibility", and we owe a lot of tech progress to it.
- Sakos 3y agoI love the term "adversarial compatibility". If I had to describe technological progress in computing for the past 40 years, that's what I'd use.
- kalleboo 3y agoYeah originally cylinder-head-sector sizing was used, but we soon realized that you could fit more sectors on the outer cylinders that fly by the read head faster than the inner ones (closer to constant linear velocity) and suddenly you didn't have a fixed "sectors per cylinder" and the system broke down, so the drives had to lie to the system. ATA/IDE was introduced in 1986 and a replacement for CHS wasn't introduced until 2002 when the 8 GB limit of the multiple of the fake CHS sizes became a problem.