Re: Re: Fidonews
By: John Dovey to Kurt Weiske on Fri Jul 29 2022 01:02 pm

... And then you typed 'G=C800:5', right?

That rings a faint bell. Wasn't that to format a hard drive?

It would execute ("Go") the 8086/88 instructions at address C800:5, which was usually located in the firmware (embedded software) of a Western Digital compatible hard disk controller. What that firmware did (e.g. maybe low-level format a ST506 drive), was up to the company and programmers that provided that firmware, so it wasn't always consistent, but yeah, that's how you'd get into (jump-to or execute) the firmware in the first place.

John Dovey wrote to Kurt Weiske <=-

... And then you typed 'G=C800:5', right?

That rings a faint bell. Wasn't that to format a hard drive?

yes, that was to low-level format an MFM drive with certain controllers.

Thought so. I ran my first BBS on an XT with a 19 Meg HDD and I had to do that to format the second 10 Meg HDD I added to store BBS files..
Good Times.

... Adding on

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