> I once put a ~ 1GB disk to an original IBM PC... > a SCSI disk, with SCSI adapter that had its own > BIOS. > As I recall it didn't take even all day to format > it, > but running the program the setup was for took > almost three months. > (No, it had nothing to with cameras, let alone EOS.) > > -- > Tapani Tarvainen
Howdy I think all scsi controller cards had their own low level formatting utility, so formatting speed would depend on the controller/drive combo. In fact I think all controlleres except maybe IDEs had some sort of formatter. I remember my first PC, a deskpro 8086 that I still keep around somewhere, had a controller that could format by going to debug and doing g=c800:5 Or something like that. I think it may have been an st506 or mfm drive but I don't remember anymore. The ESDIs on my second machine also formatted the same way. There are still utilities today that allow you to low level fotrmat IDEs with your own interleave and sector size. But I doubt anybody uses them. The only use I ever found for one of those was for geting rid of a boot sector virus caught on a sector boundary of an ide drive. What a copout! Wow I used to have fun! As for the printer, All I know is what I heard. I'm pretty sure it was an IBM printer of the kind you would have found attached to a mainframe. It was supposed to be some sort of super high speed printer that could print as fast as it could be fed or something like that. Not sure but I think it was a dot matrix. Of course maybe I simply concluded that myself since lasers weren't very fast then. I heard the story around 1995 and I think it was about an old printer back then. The guy told me the story as an anecdote. I'm not sure if he saw it himself or had just heard of it. Now I'm getting curious again! Of course I guess the thing could have been defective and someone said, perhaps jokingly "Why the critter's so fast it burns the paper!" and someone else ran with it! Javier Javier http://www.ultragone.net www.ultragone.net ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need a vacation? Get great deals to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel. http://travel.yahoo.com/ * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
