31 Oct
2001
31 Oct
'01
8:29 a.m.
The way I seem to remember it is that, back then, we were amazed when things
worked, rather than being irked when they didn't. Apple's attitude was clearl,
though, and that was that if your data really mattered, you'd certainly use a
computer and not an Apple. The Apple wasn't designed from the ground up as a
computing machine, but rather as a video toy (not in the disparaging sense) on
the order of the several other video games of the time, which, coincidentally
could also do some computing. Apple's approach was that if people were willing
to buy an Apple and then use it for useful work, they'd try to charge as much as
they possibly could, since the overall cost ostensibly would be low initially,
and then they'd make their money on the disk drives, (where they had some real
margin) and other add-ons that it took to convert the Apple into a computer
capable of doing useful work.
What makes all this crystal clear is that if I fire up an Apple today, it still
does all the stupid disk-subsystem-related crap it did back then, only, by now,
nobody would even think of putting up with that. Back then, it was about par
for the course, but it wouldn't last a week in today's environment.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sellam Ismail" <foo(a)siconic.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: hard-sector 5 1/4 disk
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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