Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Wed, 1 May 91 16:13:26 -0400 From: Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Prodigy or Fraudigy ??? Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 329, Message 7 of 9 Lines: 37 Toby Nixon writes: > ... even formatting a disk does not remove old information! I beg to differ. Vehemently so. I used to design controllers for both floppy and hard disks - I did it for about 14 years, using SSI and MSI chips and, later, LSI controller chips. The formatting operation must by its very nature destroy the old data. Formatting is a write operation that is done without reading to verify position. It writes both the sector preambles and the data fields instead of only the data fields. LSI chips have a register into which the controlling hardware loads the data pattern to be written into every byte position in the data fields. Not wiping out old data in a formatting operation would mean that the data fields weren't being written - this makes no sense because the propose of a formatting operation is to put readable information on a previously unused disk. The previous claim, that data is in the freshly-allocated sectors by virtue of their having been marked in the FAT as available, is true. You say Prodigy doesn't upload this stale data. If I were paranoid, I'd respond that of course you would say that -- after all, as a beta tester you're probably going to be on Prodigy's side in any such argument. After reading both sides of this discussion, I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that I would have to use Prodigy's software --- most other BBSs let you use any old telecomms package. Maybe it's just as well that Prodigy doesn't sell a package for the Apple II. Dick Binder (Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis) Digital Equipment Corporation DEC Easynet: DECVAX::BINDER 110 Spit Brook Road, ZKO3-3/Y32 uucp: ...!decvax.dec.com!binder Nashua, NH 03062 Internet: binder@decvax.dec.com