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Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

The first thing that popped into my mind was the old "defragment disk" visualisation. It looked a lot like the later XP version[0].

Sitting in front of the computer watching the old 95/98 defrag program doing its thing[1] is a nice childhood memory for me.

[0]: https://qvdesign.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/defrag-original... [1]: https://academy.avast.com/hs-fs/hubfs/New_Avast_Academy/how_...

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The crazy thing about the 9x defrag was that it required that no other program access the disk while it was working. When anything else wrote to disk, it would say "disk contents changed, starting over..."

You were expected to close down all programs and little utilities that hid in the systray (sorry, notification area). The OS itself was just the OS, there was no indexing happening, no update check, no random nonsense nobody understands. You could be absolutely sure nothing would access the disk on a cleanly booted win9x.

As 95 went on making sure hidden applications didn't exist got harder and harder too. It seemed over time more applications would use the equivalent of a TSR application that ran in the background with no icon in the systray/start bar and on a regular basis would fiddle with the disk restarting the entire process.

I remember some commonly used winmodem driver would cause this behavior.

At that point I'd rather it ran like the old DOS versions or later Filesystem checks at startup (very useful for boot partitions).

I have a similar memory, there's something entrancing about watching a computer do a computationally (in space or time) difficult task with a visualisation about what exactly is actually happening. For defrag it was mostly a progress bar, but still it was fascinating to young me

I kind of think of computer microarchitecure as a factory, as in factorio (Which I admit I have not played, because I've been warned against it)

There's instruction stream streams into L3, L2, L1 caches from DRAM, PCIE, DMA

then there's multiple cores and they each have register files, they shuffle numbers between registers and the caches.

There's reordering going on, there's parallelisation going on, lots of conveyor belts.

It's all so complicated factory.

Absolutely, just the results of the factory are not physical. You can apply this analogy quite far inside software development, engineers are factories producing data for a compute factory to further process etc. Also I'll echo warnings about factorio, you will lose days. But so very worth it.

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