1 Feb
2007
1 Feb
'07
10:29 p.m.
Rumor has it that Warren Wolfe may have mentioned these words:
On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 13:35 -0600, Jim Isbell, W5JAI wrote:
The apple was a flop, yes. The Commodore also was a
flop.
From a purely "the company made a tidy profit" standpoint, I would have to
disagree with you. ;-)
While TRS-DOS wasn't
actively bad, it was highly clumsy, and did odd things for some speed
which tied it to specific hardware altogether too tightly,
IMHO, no more odd than most other platform-based OSs of the time...
Considering that it was originally designed for solely one rather specific
computer line, it's not surprising for it to be tied rather tightly to the
hardware.
such as
sticking the directory of a diskette in the middle tracks of the
diskette. That kind of kludge doesn't translate well to a move to hard
drives, and other large media.
Mid-drive directories/FATs/GATs a "kludge?" Ah, no... There are specific
(and very logical) reasons for that, and as long as you don't store files
larger than half of the available storage (else you'd have a guaranteed
fragmented file) what does it matter *where* you stick the directory info???
When you have a fairly full floppy, you're never more than 1/2 the disk
away from your directory info. If you put a directory structure in the
middle of a hard drive, that fact wouldn't change, would it?
Not to mention: Why doesn't *every* OS stick the system files on the *last*
tracks of the media? It would be much easier to re-sysgen said media
without worrying about the OS kernel getting too large for the preallocated
area of the disk/drive.
Today I use Linux...an offshoot of the Apple....
Ah... no. *Way* off on that one, Jim! 'Nuff said.
which is far superior to
Windows and their "pretend" DOS. But it wasn't back then.
Not for playing games... well... except Rogue. Rogue on the IBMs *sucked*.
OS-9 and the CoCo rule for that! ;-)
What I found was that Mac
owners (more often hobbyists) tended to hide the fact when their
computer crashed,
So did MacOS! Did you ever try to troubleshoot an
"Error Number -61259" message???
[[ No, I don't remember the exact number - but it turned out to be a
dysfunctional Ethernet card - and after 5 techs telling me "That error
message is *impossible*"... I actually started _preferring_ BSoDs...
:-/ ]]
Ah well... bedtime.
See y'all tomorrow,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch at 30below.com |