Comment by rsi_oww
10 years ago
I did something like this when I was a kid, in QuickBasic. Not as sophisticated - it would just randomly create, append to, and delete files.
I tested it on floppy disks - if you let it run for a while, the remaining free space was so fragmented it was almost unusable. You could hear the poor floppy drive seeking like crazy just to open a tiny text file.
The fun part was defragmenting it afterwards - I miss the days of the graphical defrag that Norton and MS had.
That was such a pure pleasure. I can't exactly picture it but I remember it was sort of like watching your dwarf fortress.
My favorite ones would show you a grid representing all the clusters on the disk. You would see an open block for free space and a solid block for allocated space.
Then it would highlight a span of blocks to indicate reading.
Finally it would write those clusters elsewhere, indicating so with a different color.
Edit: Uhh.. and HN deleted my diagrams. See http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=nKHddiKe
For your enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPv1gQ5Rs8A
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Norton Speed Disk? http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-con...
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Agreed, very soothing and hypnotic to watch!
You can get graphical defragers today...
Defraggler is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. I love that kind of interactivity in applications, so much better than a loading bar.
My first thought as well, but apparently there is another one.
http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Seems it even offers a terminal interface for the real nostalgic kick.
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