31 Oct
2001
31 Oct
'01
10:41 a.m.
On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
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, I have my old Apple //e sitting behind me set up on a desk. I will
fire it up from time to time for various reasons both nostalgic and
practical. If I go to access files on my diskettes, they are still there,
and they read fine. Old video games I play from time to time load fine.
If there was ever a major problem as you describe with the disk system on
the Apple ][, I along with several thousand other Apple ][ enthusiasts,
would not have large collections of old Apple ][ disks that we still use
to this day.
If all PCs up and died today (say Bill Gates planted some super nasty
secret bug that made all PCs explode because we refused to give him our
first borns) I could go back to my Apple //e, where I would write and save
and load documents, work on spreadsheets stored on disk, download and
upload files to and from disk over a modem, play games from disk, etc.
Everything I could do on my PC, only a little slower and without nearly as
many crashes, but the fact is, it would work.
I'm not going to argue with the experience you had. It sounds like you
had the worst luck of anyone I've ever known. You may want to consider
investing in a rabbit's foot. But your experience is certainly not
typical. I'd describe it as ultra-super-rare.
And I think from this point you should describe any opinion you have of
the Apple Disk ][ system as just that--YOUR OPINION. Then I won't have to
respond to your messages ;)
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org