Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!
From: hobbit@pyrite.rutgers.edu (*Hobbit*)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: why don't more people, er, *manufacturers*, do this?!
Message-ID: <dogshit-0@pyrite.rutgers.edu>
Date: 10 Feb 90 10:15:00 GMT
Lines: 18
Approved: God

Having just bought a used PC-lookalike, the first thing I did was to install
a write-protect switch in same for the hard disk.  It simply opens up the lead
to pin 6 of the larger ST506 plug, the write-gate.  So there's no fucking way
a Nasty Thing could shit on my hard drive, and I could boot and run evil
virus-containing games and such with impunity.  This machine even comes
with a REAL hard-reset button, so I don't have to be forever powering it
down and up again when it gets wedged.  I cannot *imagine* why manufacturers
of these things don't install these two features and similar ones.

The neat thing is that due to disk buffering, if you go to create a file,
MS-Loss thinks it actually *did* create a file and write it out there.
There's no way it actually senses if the write-gate successfully got to the
drive or not.  Next time you do a directory, however, apparently while it's
computing the free bytes at the end it flushes the buffers, and the "file"
you just created mysteriously disappears.  [Perhaps someone more handy
with MS-Loss than I can enlighten us on how this buffering works.]

_H*