31 Oct
2001
31 Oct
'01
2:34 a.m.
On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
It's not pilot error that causes the Apple disk
subsystem to fall
apart whenever there's the slightest error, it's the "we've got your
money now, so we've got you by the short and curly" attitude that
Apple has always had with respet to their customers' data. That
design of WOZ's was clever and cheap, ... REALLY cheap ... , but not
terribly reliable. Back in the early '80's I didn't know a single
user of the genuine Apple disk subsystem that didn't have a data loss
per hour in steady use. The guy I mentioned initially had phone-order
You must have had some very unlucky friends. If everyone had this same
experience then there probably would not have been millions of Apple disk
systems sold.
business, and, because his environment was not
perfectly clean, he was
constantly having to reboot his Apple, since it couldn't recover from
a disk read error, and this was before he had a toll-free number.
Sounds like shitty software to me.
I remember how people whined about the PC's
<abort, retry, fail> error
message for disk errors, yet Apple didn't even have one. It just went
TILT.
No it didn't.
Even back in those days we'd all come to expect
better than that, and,
by the way, the whole problem was exxentially gone if one used 8"
FDD's with the SVA controller.
How did that fix bad software with poorly designed error recovery?
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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