Comment on Let's talk about the curious and ingenious DriveSpace, an MS-DOS program promising to double the available disk space.

xmanmonk@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Decipher0771@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Different tools. Speed disk was a disk defragmenter, DriveSpace was whole disk compression. The Norton tool you’d have used a lot if you used DriveSpace was Norton Disk Doctor.

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  • sj_zero ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they're famous for now.

    • ksaj@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Raise your hand if you used to sit and watch Norton’s defragger do its thing! 🤩

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    • Decipher0771@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      DOS has always? had chkdsk, but ndd had a knack for being able to recover data from minor corruptions way better than chkdsk did.

      Between ndd, Spinrite, and I can’t remember the name of the undelete tools, I saved a lot of homework assignments.

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      • sj_zero ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        chkdsk in dos never had the ability to scan the disk surface for defects, ndd did that, and then magically scandisk showed up and looked awfully similar to ndd.

        But I agree, some really great tools. And sysinfo was our de facto "how fast is this thing?" for years.

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• LucyLastic@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Didn’t speed disk do an optimised defragment operation, putting OS files at the start of the drive etc

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