Re: A or AN before an abbreviation???


On Tue, 6 May 2008 22:03:12 +0000 (UTC), Garrett Wollman posted:

In article <5ld124toupuc3hmkpfhl4iukojfgcnrif2@xxxxxxx>,
Oleg Lego <rat@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nonetheless, I have always considered disk drives to be random access
storage because, unlike tape, you can skip large numbers of sectors
without having to count or read them, ending up having to read or skip
a relatively few sectors to home in on the one you want.

In the SCSI family of standards, a tape device implements the
"sequential access" command set, and a disk device implements the
"direct access" command set (which is why the respective drivers in
FreeBSD are called "sa" and "da").

And in IBM terms, disk drives were "DASD", pronounced "daz-dee", for
Direct Access Storage Device.

.

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