Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!rpi!pawl.rpi.edu!tale From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Message-ID: Date: 11 Feb 89 20:31:02 GMT References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <4744@sfsup.UUCP> <2887@sybase.sybase.com> <1912I78BC@CUNYVM> <1036@tutor.tut.fi> <6761@pogo.GPID.TEK.COM> <557@rpi.edu> <6321@saturn.ucsc.edu> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu Organization: The Octagon Room Lines: 21 In-reply-to: haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU's message of 11 Feb 89 05:35:21 GMT In article <6321@saturn.ucsc.edu> haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) writes: In RSTS/E you could ask for disk space and what you got was not zeroed out. So you could scan it and read entire files - in fact somebody wrote a utility for recovering accidentally deleted files. Gosh, that's hardly uncommon. In fact, MS-DOS simply clears the first character in the disk directory to delete a file. If you don't write any information to the disk, reconstructing the file (fragmented or not) is a very trivial matter. Of course, MS-DOS has no real concept of file permissions and such, so if you can get someone's disk it is quite easy to read anything on it. Please not that this is for old versions of MS-DOS, I have no idea what the state of that world is like now. About all I use my original-model IBM PC for anymore is a terminal to connect to bigger machines. Dave -- tale@rpitsmts.bitnet, tale%mts@rpitsgw.rpi.edu, tale@pawl.rpi.edu