16 Jun
2016
16 Jun
'16
12:35 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
So did the Amiga and it didn't have the baggage of drive letters.
Okay, so it had drive names. Instead of
A:\path\to\file
it had:
DF0:path/to/file
But you also had logical drive names. Give the drive the name "Fred" and
you could reference a file as:
Fred:path/to/file
A nice side effect is that if there was no disk with the name of "Fred"
installed, AmigaOS would pop up a dialog box asking for the user to insert
the disk named "Fred". It wouldn't matter what physical drive you popped
the disk into, AmigaOS would find it. And, if you copied the files off the
disk Fred to the harddrive, say:
DH1:applications/local/fred
you could do
assign Fred=DH1:applications/local/fred
and there you go. I find that nicer than environment variables in that it's
invisible to applications---the OS handles it for you. And while on Unix,
the shell will expand environment variables, individual applications (say,
an editor) vary on support for such expansions.
Personally, I like CLIs, but I'm used to them from the start. And for
some work flows, I find its faster and easier than a graphical system.
My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more.
Then why even bother with DR-DOS then?
-spc
On 14 June 2016 at 01:56, Sean Conner <spc at
conman.org> wrote:
What do you
feel is still missing from OS-X today? About the only thing I
can think of is the unique file system, where each file had a data and a
resource fork.
* The clean, totally CLI-less nature of it. Atari ST GEM imitated this,
but it had the DOS-like legacy baggage of drive letters etc. I wish the Star Trek project had come to some kind of
fruition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Reading that, it sounds like it would have been much like early
Windows---an application that would run on top of MS-DOS (or in this case,
DR-DOS).