Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online
defrag98.com
defrag98.com
We also have memory fragmenters to do the same for memory for the same reasons.
Admittedly I haven’t made much of a search, but various search engines and autocorrects seem really convinced that I mean “defragmenter” instead of “fragmenter,” despite myself…
Actually here is a recent paper discussing this (although the basic concept is much older):
So many of us spent so much time staring at the barrel of a particle accelerator.
Now everything is just easier (which is better for most people!) but I miss the old days.
20 years ago if somebody told you they used Linux it really meant something - they weren't running WSL, they weren't running a VM in EC2, they probably didn't power on and immediately have things working, and they probably learned a ton just getting to a login screen for the first time. Spinning up a VM just doesn't give the same learning experience.
Package mgmt was a nightmare and dependency based managers like yellow dogs APT and nonexistent redhats rpm didn't exist.
More like than not you had to compile some random a55 tarball from src and hoped ./configure && make && make all would work or spend hours on USENET looking for solutions (or mailing lists!).
If you inspect and go to sources and look for "1e3 /" you'll find the line responsible, you can set a breakpoint and change e.disk.iops to 1000 which will make the timeout per row 1s instead of 2-4s, so the whole thing goes faster.
Source: Watching a disk defrag was every millenial kids equivalent of going to the laundromat and watching laundry tumble.
https://morello.dev/blog/defrag98-rebuild
what it looked like before
https://morello.dev/blog/windows-98-defrag-simulator
a previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962195
here is another version i found when googling these things that seems somewhat similar, but with a few more "accurate" features. also, has the source available in a single file.
https://horatioconkerhead.github.io/win98-defrag/
if you want the real deal, you can run windows 95 in the browser quick. it took running it a few times to get it to actually defrag:
afaics all that meant was file allocations make a little extra space at the end, so if the file expands it doesn't need to allocate a new block.
If one keeps files around for a long time and constantly adds to them, then the files get fragmented on any filesystem.
The only way to avoid this is pre-allocate all files to their maximum possible size and never exceed that size.
> The HFS Plus file system transparently defragments files that are less than 20 MiB in size and are broken into 8 or more fragments when the file is being opened.
Which I expect would have significantly reduced the need to defrag and thus reduced the joy of computing. :p
I did it in computer lab and showed others and the teacher lost it, thought we were breaking things.
Typically it would be getting some bits from other parts of the drive and there would be a few (that many) bits it wouldn't move because they were the swap file and DOS boot system files.
Such things did exist back in the day, but they were relatively expensive to run since they had to run all the time. There was one that I used to run back in the 90s when windows was a thing. I think maybe it was diskeeper but I'm not sure.
As great as it is, way too fast.
When I changed it between drives and back I lost my progress :/
Per-drive individual sounds, and BSoD included. Nice touches, love it!
Now that I mentioned it, I might know what to do with one of those LED panels.
I’m going to watch Johnny Castaway now.
If AI generated this is what the AI revolution is all about.
Can we get a cross platform screensaver?
And it blue screens?