[TUHS] Clever code

Ralph Corderoy ralph at inputplus.co.uk
Wed Dec 14 02:14:42 AEST 2022


Hi Bakul,

> Fortune 32:16 was a 5.6Mhz machine and couldn't process 1020KB/sec
> (17 sectors/track of early ST412/ST506 disks) fast enough.  As Warner
> said, one dealt with it by formatting the disk so that the logical
> blocks N & N+1 (from the OS PoV) were physically more than 1 sector
> apart.

Sticking with ST506 hard drives, by the time the 8 MHz ARM2 from Acorn
was reading a 56 MB Rodime, it was the drive which couldn't keep up so
executables were stored compressed on disk so the CPU had something to
do, uncompressing the sector's content, while it waited for the next
sector to arrive.  :-)

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.


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