>On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Alessandro Zummo wrote:
>>> Many years ago computr manuals used to tll you 'nothing you can do can
>>> harm the machine so experiment and enjoy'. On any modern PC you can erase
>>
>>good old times. sniff :-')
>
>*grin* Actually, in those days, that was an out-right lie! Spin down the
>hard drive and then send it a seek command... most hard drives won't do that
>anymore. Or, run a full stroke seek test for an hour... (I've actually seen
>a modern seagate IDE drive sling a pickup head off doing that once.)
And everybody knows about the video card/monitor combinations of that
era that could be used to communicate via smoke signals...
Go back further. The commodore pet: A single command from the command
line could permanently fry the thing (changing the power supply's
voltage from US to european voltage inputs in software, I believe.)
And the 1541 disk drive (with the Commodore 64), repeatedly slammed its
read/write head against its end stop to be sure it had seeked back to
track 0 every time it hit a disk error (and of course threw itself out
of alignment about the fifth time it did that if the drive had been
running long enough that the little screw holding everything in place
had heated up and expanded). The great fun was the intentional disk
errors used for copy protection, so we all got out our screwdrivers
every couple of weeks and recalibrated our drive. (Many of us never
bothered to put the cover back on at all...)
Of course, since everything was in ROM and the sucker rebooted instantly
when you switched it off and back on (so no point leaving it on when not
in use), there weren't exactly a lot of commodore viruses, now were
there? :)
Software-damageable hardware is nothing new. STUPID, but not new.
Rob
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 23 2000 - 21:00:19 EST