It's funny how such basic things from the past were thrown away. Every floppy disk ever had this.
However, i also believe that if such a thing existed for modern gear, it would only be used by 1% of people, and even then, mostly accidentally, resulting in millions of trouble tickets. So I'm not sure what the compromise is.
I don't buy the argument that if not everyone uses it, nobody should get it.
BTW, I would read TV repair manuals as a kid (yes, weird). There was always the "check to see if it is plugged in". Plugging TVs in made a lot of money for service people.
I see similar things in car manuals for car won't start. "Put gas in it."
Edit: This was back in the days when you could repair a TV with a soldering iron and a screwdriver. Every hardware store had a tube testing machine. I'd have fun by randomly swapping the tubes that fit in the same socket and seeing what effect that would have on the TV's operation.
I was also the family "TV tube test person" as a kid. I must have been around 6 or 7.
For the young'uns, TV sets used to have tubes and hand-soldered point-to-point circuitry. Just like an ENIAC, a tube TV would always "go on the fritz" as the tubes burned out.
My dad showed me how to pull out all the tubes, and we would put them in a cigar box and go to the little corner grocery, which had a tube tester in front. I would dial up all the settings for each tube and test it, and we would buy replacements for the bad ones. Take them back home and I would plug them in, and the TV worked again! Dad was always generous and made sure I got credit for it.
BTW did you ever get to discharge the high voltage connection to the picture tube with a screwdriver and wire with alligator clips? One clip to chassis ground, the other to the screwdriver, then slip the screwdriver under the rubber insulated connector, and BANG!
I'll never forget the time I was driving to pick up my first new car. I was 3 blocks from the dealer when my old car died. Nothing I did could get it started again. Finally a cop pulled up and asked if I was having trouble. I told him, then he asked if I had gas. Of course since I was anticipating a new car, I hadn't been paying attention to the gas level in the old one. Thankfully I was just across the street from a gas station.
> I don't buy the argument that if not everyone uses it, nobody should get it.
That's not the argument. The argument is that for every N people who use the feature, X*N ( X>>1 ) will accidentally enable the feature and thus require an expensive tech support call.
SD cards had this, but it's up to the driver to respect that. There is nothing in hardware preventing writes, it's just a signal to software saying "Hey, please don't write to me!"
I don’t remember PATA(IDE) disks having Write Enable jumper settings. Apparently some parallel SCSI drives had them but pretty rare for non-removable media at all.
It's funny how such basic things from the past were thrown away. Every floppy disk ever had this.
However, i also believe that if such a thing existed for modern gear, it would only be used by 1% of people, and even then, mostly accidentally, resulting in millions of trouble tickets. So I'm not sure what the compromise is.