Derek, Thanks for the help it worked perfectly.It does seem alittle backwards though after using the DOS copy command for so long.. I actually looked up this command in the Kaypro manual, but did not find anything, its very difficult to find anything in it, and also no pictures either.. <Grin>!! Maybe someone should write a book called "CP/M for Dummies" with lots of Pictures and illustrations... Phil...

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, D. Peschel wrote: I don't recall how I showed it, but there must not be a space after the file extension and the '['. Otherwise you get an error. It has one virtue. It is good for downloading MEX! Oh, and it's only $3. - don

Phil Clayton said... | |Maybe someone should write a book called "CP/M for Dummies" with lots of |Pictures and illustrations... And print up and bind one copy, with a copyright date of 1980, and sell it on eBay for scads of money! -Miles

D. Peschel said... | |You can use wildcards * and ? to specify the file on B:. They work the same |way as in DOS (unfortunately). If you specify one file on B:, you can give |it a different name on A: by adding the name before the equals sign. No, Dos works the same way as CP/M, unfortunately. CP/M was OK for its time, but DOS really should have been better. And it might have been, had a certain Mr. Gates not snookered its developer & sold the thing to IBM... -Miles

D. Peschel said... | |> No, Dos works the same way as CP/M, unfortunately. | |Apparently I was unclear. No, you were clear. You missed my point. CP/M came first, then DOS. Therefore DOS worked liked CP/M, not the other way around. Your technical explanation was fine, I was just nitpicking. I refuse to give Micro$oft or Bill Gates one damned iota of glory after all they stole from others. |Yes, it should have. And the more MS waited to improve DOS (because there |was no incentive since they already had a monopoly, or because they were |sloppy programmers, or for backward-compatibility reasons) the more |excruciating the thought of improvements which would break old programs DEC pulled it off with VMS. The people who had to have the old compatibility just kept running the old hardware and software, and everyone else moved forwards. And right happy about it most of us were. We ended up with an awesome development system that did OK for realtime (VAX/VMS) and an awesome realtime system that still needed better developer tools (PDP/whatever) 8^) |became. If they had just ripped off a better OS, that might have been nice |as well. Something with long file names, or multitasking, or whatever. |And OSs of the time DID have long file names. I don't know about |multitasking (maybe OS/9 or FLEX were around when DOS was born?). VMS was at least in the works, and UNIX was around in some forms. There was precedent. But the guy hacking DOS was just messing around, trying to do a slightly better CP/M (as was Digital Research, who GAVE AWAY the whole stinking computer world to Bill Gates on a silver platter, with a military escort, and a ticker tape parade. For crying out loud, the first versions of UNIX ran on minis that didn't have any more memory space than micros. (OK, so they had 16 bit processors, I know. So did the PC! Sort of...) Not that I'm bitter, you understand. 8^) -Miles

On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, D. Peschel wrote: Hewlett Packard! They should have owned the PC world, not DEC, not IBM. They were always pushing the envelope, they understood usability issues, including portability (my first computer was a 1974 HP65 -- no it's not a calculator, it's an amazing portable computer that nothing could touch until many years later). If the Universe had warped a bit such that HP decided to market to consumers much earlier or we had *many* more scientists and engineers (their target market) in the world, we'd be sitting very pretty. -- Doug

On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, D. Peschel wrote: Oh yeah, like HP is the only one that behaves that way. That's how every company protects their market (except IBM with the PC, in which they forgot that one time and lost a monopoly). But I agree, HP seems to go out of their way to Think Different :-) As long as we're writing science fiction, here's the timeline for my parallel universe: 1972: HP introduces the 9830 and markets it as a business machine as well as a scientific/engineering machine 1974: HP introduces the 65, and offers hefty discounts to students 1975: HP reject's Woz's idea for a personal computer, telling him instead to use the HP65 form factor with an optional detachable querty keyboard and TV video interface 1976: HP introduces the Wozple 1 1977: Dennis Ritchie leaves AT&T for HP and ports Unix to the Wozple 1978: Memory prices drop, Wozple RAM is increased to 1MB 1979: Xerox introduces SmallTalk for the Wozple ... 1995: Wozple 3-D laser memory cube upgrade to 32GB available 1996: Wozple connection machine node count increased to 4 billion 1997: Wozple intercommunication bandwidth exceeds 1 GB/s 1998: Wozple eyephone resolution matches film 1999: Wozple neural implants drop in price to $0.50 2000: An obscure Harvard grad named Gates is suspended from ebay for selling counterfeit Beanie Babies Oh well, back to running scandisk on my WinTel box. -- Doug

"D. Peschel" &lt;dpeschel(a)u.washington.edu&gt; wrote:

No. Before it was called TOPS-10, it was just "Monitor". My understanding of it was that the SAT was just a bitmap of the available blocks on the disk, and that each file had a RIB (Retrieval Information Block) which pointed to the actual data blocks of the file. This is very similar to the allocation bitmap, inodes, and indirect blocks used by Unix, and not very similar to the 86-DOS (AKA QDOS, MS-DOS, IBM-DOS) FAT. I'm definitely not an expert on the internals of Monitor, so I'd love to see that email. There has yet to be invented a file system that doesn't get corrupted. Even log-based file systems written to WORM media have been known to get corrupted, although it is easier to repair the damage. Of course, on a PDP-10 (or PDP-6), people didn't just yank the disk out of the drive (or reboot) at any old time. Disks had to be unmounted; the operator would issue the unmount command before spinning down the disk, and that would force the operating system to write any dirty buffers back to the disk, leaving it in a (hopefully) consistent state. The problems with corruption commonly occuring with MS-DOS are mostly caused by two phenomena: 1. The user removing diskettes or rebooting the system while the disk is not consistent. This could be mitigated to a large extent by a log-based file system. However, MS-DOS was certainly not any worse about this problem than any other contemporary disk operating system for small machines (i.e., that had to run in 64K or less RAM). 2. The lack of any memory protection to keep ill-behaved or buggy programs from corrupting the in-memory structures, which then can result in corrupted data being written to disk. Memory protection would largely eliminate this. A log-based file system wouldn't eliminate this problem, but would make it easier to recover. However, contemporary microcomputers weren't any better in this regard either. The FAT file system was a reasonable design at the time given the objective of having a file system for low-capacity removable media, and not requiring much RAM to deal with it. The mistake was to keep extending FAT to higher capacity drive and larger systems. It's now about 19 years old, about 16 years longer than it should have lived. And those idiots in Redmond don't seem to have any plan for a suitable replacement for desktop (not server) platforms.

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote: Remind me again about why this was a fallacy. I thought the idea was to reduce the average seek time slightly by minimizing the average distance the head traveled by factor of 2 versus a directory on a track at one end of the disk. -- Doug

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote: I don't know if this makes complete sense on the Apple disk drives. When you wanted to step, say, 5 tracks over, you massaged the stepper motor the requisite number of times to get it to where you assumed it would be 5 tracks over. Then the DOS went about its business reading for the sector it was looking for. If it didn't find it then it assumed a problem and recalibrated (to track 0), then stepped back the requisite number of times to get to the track you originally were headed for. This scheme resulted in 99.99999% success in jumping from track to track. And the CATALOG track was 17 (on a 34 track formatted disk). Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always being hassled by the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 12/27/98]

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Basicly the same on the Apple - just with a bigger problem: The Disk ][ did 4 steps for every track, so quater tracks, and wrong positioning by a quater of a track was possible. With some drives the read signal was still readable a quater track aside, so you could end up with a somewhat working disk where some tracks where maladjusted - a horror when exchanging. Later on this was also used as copy protection, to shift tracks - And there was also a programm that modified DOS to write tracks closer (only 3 steps). Of course completely incompatible, and _very_ drive and disk quality dependant. Gruss H. -- Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut HRK

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We used to put the OS/32 directory in the center for optimization. Early Unix admins put /usr in the center of the disk (or /swap) to minimize seeks. DEC did the same, I think on some OS's. Also, I always felt putting the directory at the beginning or the end of the disk increased the possibility of data loss through head crash since the beginning of the disk was a common crash point at load time with dirty packs and the end of the pack was where the bad sector data was and was an area where I didn't want a lot of action. Bill --- Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller bpechter(a)shell.monmouth.com | pechter(a)pechter.ddns.org

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Miles O'Neal wrote: What do you think might have happened if Mr. Gates had not done what he did? It is really easy to knock something with the benefit of hindsight, and most of us do that. Just be prepared for questions such as the one I just asked :)!

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Phil Clayton wrote: PIP a:=b:filename.ext[ov] - [ov] specifies 'object' and 'verify'. - don