Disasters and Recovery

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun Jan 17 20:50:43 1999

> > I wonder if the hard drive and motherboard manufacturers would have any
> > sympathy for people who are making time capsules and give out their
> > proprietary information? Probably not but it's worth a shot. :)
>
> There isn't _that_ much proprietary information, actually, other than
> gate-level diagrams of all the chips, which you have _no_ chance of getting.

What about the details of the block replacement algorithm and data
structures?

What about the details of the operation of the embedded servo?

What about source code of the firmware?

Reverse-engineering a working drive might be feasible (but very
difficult); Reverse-engineering from a broken drive (or pieces of
a drive) could be *very* challenging. If someone handed me a
100-year-old hard drive (possibly containing the only surviving
copy of the Ada compiler for the Analytical Engine), I think I'd
tell them it wasn't worth the effort. And bear in mind, I'm
someone who thinks that preserving the history of computing is
important!
Received on Sun Jan 17 1999 - 20:50:43 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:32:06 BST