I'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either.
If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers on a motherboard. Given the physical size of disks even you'd probably just have a boot disk, maybe a data disk and then perhaps two optical drives. So it's absolutely believable that nobody found the bug simply because nobody had a machine configured that way.
Sure, you could have SCSI for more disks. But if you did, then you were probably doing something that required a lot of CPU grunt - at which point you might just leave the PC behind and go to a UNIX workstation anyway.
OK, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to just how bad SCSI support was on the PC, and it's stripping the the rose-tint from my glasses. Time to go!
I had 3+ fixed disks somewhere around 1997, but that was on a Mac (so built-in SCSI), and the drives were all hand-me-downs that I got for free, that I could just plug and play to add a few more hundred megs of storage.
> ... was missed for years simply because no one had a PC with more than two hard disks.
Thats a hardware limit:
Early mainboards only had a single IDE / parallel ATA port. Each port has two pins for drive select, so you had a maximum of two addressable drives, the master and slave drive.
With a secondary ATA port you got another set of master/slave, pushing the limit to 4 drives.
That's where the "primary master" text comes from that showed up on the screen during booting.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadI'm honestly not sure I had a machine with more than 2 fixed disks until well into the days of Windows 7 and SATA. The exception would be logical disks such as Stacker or similar compressed volumes - but I wasn't using them until later either.
If I recall correctly before SATA we had IDE which only had two devices (primary & secondary) per controller, and usually only two controllers on a motherboard. Given the physical size of disks even you'd probably just have a boot disk, maybe a data disk and then perhaps two optical drives. So it's absolutely believable that nobody found the bug simply because nobody had a machine configured that way.
Sure, you could have SCSI for more disks. But if you did, then you were probably doing something that required a lot of CPU grunt - at which point you might just leave the PC behind and go to a UNIX workstation anyway.
OK, now I'm starting to get flashbacks to just how bad SCSI support was on the PC, and it's stripping the the rose-tint from my glasses. Time to go!
Thats a hardware limit:
Early mainboards only had a single IDE / parallel ATA port. Each port has two pins for drive select, so you had a maximum of two addressable drives, the master and slave drive.
With a secondary ATA port you got another set of master/slave, pushing the limit to 4 drives.
That's where the "primary master" text comes from that showed up on the screen during booting.
P-ATA IDE didn't arrive until the late 80's.