On Oct 2, 2009, at 19:21 , Doug Franklin wrote:
Graydon wrote:
I am typing this is in a terminal window, using a text editor (Vim)
that
has its line wrap set to 72 for email.
That's because the last eight "digits" of the 80-column card were
typically reserved for the "card sequence numbers" to fix you up
when you dropped a deck of a couple of thousand cards.
A schema that was carried over to sectors on floppy discs, in that the
last byte in a sector pointed to the address of the next sector,
allowing discontinuous sector writing (The first byte in a sector was
the address of the sector the data had just come from). Hard drives
worked the same way back when. I do not know how the formatting and
sector addressing works these days. I imagine it's been modified to
allow for faster reading and writing. I know Apple's OS-X keeps the
files continuous by moving sectors around on the drive when it has
some spare time. Can't think of the term at the moment.
Joseph McAllister
[email protected]
“ The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
— Kevan Olesen
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