Thanks. I really do miss the disk visualizations of the DOS and Norton Disk Doctor diagnostics and defragmenters from the old days. The one for the original Mac was pretty incredible due to high res graphics, even had color coded filetypes, etc if memory serves.
Linux never had a good one to my knowledge. Improved filesystems reduced the need and then SSDs delivered the deathblow.
But I feel like the visualization was useful in itself to see what was happening on the storage device and unfortunately forgotten due to those improvements.
thats very cool. i feel like a long time ago we used to be able to cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/video ? but maybe im imagining things. i know you could do it with audio.
Yeah, it would work with /dev/dsp, the primary interface for audio IO in Open Sound System (OSS) -- the first media API for nx operating systems. Around the turn of the century it was replaced in the Linux kernel by the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Which, to this day, is still the "lowest level" high performance way to do audio w/ linux.
As for _visualizing_ the audio as video, no, that was never possible w/o writing code. =) And to do it _well_, you need to do some math as well. I say this because I wrote that code in 2001, 2003, then again in 2008, then again later... it's a ... hobby of mine :)
Linux never had a good one to my knowledge. Improved filesystems reduced the need and then SSDs delivered the deathblow.
But I feel like the visualization was useful in itself to see what was happening on the storage device and unfortunately forgotten due to those improvements.