In the same way it's satisfying to slowly transform a pile of dirty dishes into clean ones or a level full of living Doom enemies into dead ones, I remember getting a kind of enjoyment out of defragging the hard drive of my 486 in the late '90s. The visualization was a big part of it, that Windows app depicting a hard drive slowly transforming from messy navy to a cleaned-up sky blue via segments that became red as they were picked up. But the sound was a pleasingly physical thing too, a chuntering reminder that all this digital data had a real-world presence.
If you too feel a weird tingle of nostalgia for the act of defragging a hard drive, though not the necessity of actually doing it, have I got good news for you. Engineer Dennis Morello has recreated the experience of defragging your C drive in Windows 98 and you can run it in your browser right now.
In a blog post explaining this delightfully quixotic act, Morello says, "One of the biggest challenges was implementing a defragmentation algorithm that felt authentic." The custom algorithm he came up with randomly selects how many clusters to process at a time, and adjusts the speed based on which imaginary drive you've selected, from C up to F. (The longest takes an estimated 17 minutes.)
As for the sounds, Morello recorded actually hard-drive grunting and edited it to suit. The sound effects synchronize with the visualizer, and change according to the speed of the drive you've selected. It's basically way more work than you'd think to put into something a bit silly, but I've had it going the entire time I've been writing this article and it's been a pleasant reminder of the way things were in 1998.
Now that it's finished, it's time to try the new Fallout—Fallout 2—a try, or maybe this Thief: The Dark Project game I've heard such good things about. You can experience it for yourself at defrag98.com.
