17 Jun
2016
17 Jun
'16
9:57 a.m.
On 16 June 2016 at 21:35, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote:
My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more.
Then why even bother with DR-DOS then?
I don't know. I think few people outside Apple have ever even seen the code.
Perhaps, like A/UX, it had terminal windows which could run
console-mode DOS apps?
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once
stated:
So did the Amiga and it didn't have the baggage of drive letters.
Okay, so it had drive names. Instead of
A:\path\to\file
it had:
DF0:path/to/file
But you also had logical drive names. Give the drive the name "Fred" and
you could reference a file as:
Fred:path/to/file
A nice side effect is that if there was no disk with the name of "Fred"
installed, AmigaOS would pop up a dialog box asking for the user to insert
the disk named "Fred". It wouldn't matter what physical drive you popped
the disk into, AmigaOS would find it. And, if you copied the files off the
disk Fred to the harddrive, say:
DH1:applications/local/fred
you could do
assign Fred=DH1:applications/local/fred
and there you go. I find that nicer than environment variables in that it's
invisible to applications---the OS handles it for you.
Thanks for the explanation. That's more detail than I've ever read before.
I never used my A1200 much. I put a 68030 in it, mainly as it was the
cheapest way to add more Fast RAM -- but the biggest SIMM I could
physically fit was an 8MB one. I have 16MB FP-mode DRAM SIMMs in
various 680x0 Macs, but they're double-sided and won't fit.
I fitted a 400MB IDE hard disk -- the drive cost less than the special
cable -- and managed somehow to bodge and fumble my way through
installing AmigaOS 3.1 on it.
And there I left it. I hope it still works when I remove it from storage!
I cherish some hope that AROS makes headway and becomes a usable OS.
It strikes me that it'd be a good fit for the many low-end cheap ARM
devices appearing now, such as the Raspberry Pi.
On 14 June 2016 at 01:56, Sean Conner <spc at
conman.org> wrote:
What do
you feel is still missing from OS-X today? About the only thing I
can think of is the unique file system, where each file had a data and a
resource fork.
* The clean, totally CLI-less nature of it. Atari ST GEM imitated this,
but it had the DOS-like legacy baggage of drive letters etc. Personally, I like CLIs, but I'm used to them
from the start. And for
some work flows, I find its faster and easier than a graphical system.
Yes, me too. I am happy at a shell prompt and in a GUI. Most OSes that
have the latter also have the former, and many have only a CLI, of
course. It was just interesting to use machines that had a rich GUI
and not even vestiges of a CLI, such as are visible in ST GEM.
I wish the
Star Trek project had come to some kind of fruition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Reading that, it sounds like it would have been much like early
Windows---an application that would run on top of MS-DOS (or in this case,
DR-DOS).