Defining Disk Image Dump Standard

It must be tough to process such difficult issues with a single flip-flop . . . See my comments below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Sellam Ismail <foo(a)siconic.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2000 8:51 AM Subject: Re: Defining Disk Image Dump Standard Let's a OS The way you separate the operating system from the executables is by never, Never, NEVER, mixing them on the same medium, particularly if it's intended for dissemination. If the platforms are disparate, you certainly don't need to distribute the OS. A generalized and "universal" medium has to be just that. Keep in mind that what equipment was available back in the old days when these old machines were relevant doesn't matter. What you need is a way to put the material you wish to convey to some other party on a medium which is likely to be readable today and in the future by the intended destinee. I'd not be surprised to find that every diskette you own has an OS on it, else you wouldn't frame this issue as you have. For you, though not for anyone else, I'd recommend you get a chisel and put your distribution data on a stone slab. Most everyone else is smart enough to figure out how to avoid writing the OS to a diskette or tape. I'd have thought you had run into the problems with media exchange long enough ago to realize that since it's YOUR computer, YOU can tell it what to write to the medium, just as YOU can tell it how that material is to be organized and how it is to be represented. IIRC YOU were the primary opponent when this sort of issue was raised with respect to documentation archival. You opposed the common and virtually universally accepted file format used throughout the industry for exchange of documents. You wanted to reduce everything to bitmapped images 100x as large and 1% as easy to use as PDF's, just so you didn't have to use a PC to process the data into something your odd-ball system could display. Now you want to do something else that's quite similar. I'm just raising the issue that not every system has floppy disks or mag tape, and, certainly fewer have both. Then there's the issue of how to read them on system A when written on system B. The latter's inherently solvable, but if you want to archive data about or useful with a given OS, you don't have to write the data to a medium capable of reading or interpreting the OS image. The primary concern is finding a medium that's available so whoever wants to participate in the process can get it here, now, and in the future, and not by digging in a dumpster. That rules out floppy disk, mag-tape, and a lot of other media, since their longevity on the market is coming to an end. If you don't deal with that issue, you'll have to start over again with it in another 5 years. The other warts you design into the exchange process won't matter if you can't rely on getting the physical media and both generating and accepting it at each end of the process. As far as I'm concerned, until you resolve the media issue, the format of the content is a non-issue. Have you tried to read an LS120 diskette on your Apple-][ lately? It's just as I said before: You simply want to transmit, but you don't want to receive. Danger -----