On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 10:53:01PM -0800, Mike Ford wrote:
P.S. When OS/2 came out, what really impressed me
about it was its ability
to format a floppy disk and *NOT* slow down every other process running...
I was amazed by the fact that floppy access on an Amiga does *not* slow the
system either. It was merrily copying files around and everything was totally
responsive. And this was on a original, ho-hum A500.
A few years ago just at the end of the BBS era, a new little software
company came out with a Terminal package for the Mac that used their own
serial port driver. I can't remember the name, but they buffered the port
with some fairly nice code that ran I think during the "VBL" of the video
interrupt. Not only was the throughput great, no gliches, but the big demo
thing was to format a floppy during the downloading of a file. Market
window was bad though, and I don't think they lasted even a year.
I actually owned a copy of that, and went to the same school as the author.
He had written a BBS package as well (Mercury? At any rate, there was only
one, or maybe a few, good Mac BBS packages at the time, so it shouldn't be
hard to figure out which one he wrote).
Rumors said that he had put back doors in the BBS package.
The ZModem implementation in the terminal package didn't seem to work
very well with the VAX version (which, I believe, was the real thing written
by Omen). There seem to be more wrong versions of ZModem out there than
right ones. I don't know if it's the fault of lazy authors or of Omen
(for not making the spec public, or having weird marketing policies).
-- Derek