At 09:26 AM 3/4/2005, Jim Leonard wrote: Never! RT-11, maybe. There's plenty of geek haggling at Slashdot, natch: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/03/2329228&tid=190&tid… - John

Since it's 100% on topic and as of now unknown to me, what is DMS? {Stretching} These articles say that Kildall's CP/M easteregg appears in DOS 1.0 or so. Has anyone here actually run the proof for themselves? John A.

Ok - I have the Amiga vhs tape digitized as a 2gb mpg file. It's mostly the original developers, Jay, RJ, et al at some kind of reunion telling stories - with brief breaks for a few photos and home movie of RJ on stage telling stories. I can send it on a dvd in a mailer and will throw in an mpg4 episode of Computer Chronicals that focused on the Amiga - altho you can just download that problem at the beginning from my new wal-mart cheapie player. I think it's about 40 minutes or so. Photos include the original hardware with board stacks in place of the custom chips. Anyway, paypal $5 and your mail address to cswiger at widomaker.com and I'll get them in the post office Monday. Email me off list if you need to use a check or money order. --Chuck

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: Hi Curt - I don't know, but in this tape they talk about the cash crunch, mention people getting 2nd mortgages to stay solvent - but they didn't say anything about breech of contract with Atari. Jack Tramiel bought Atari from Warner in 1984 - certainly he would have taken legal action to get the chips if he thought he had a case. You know, Mr. "Business is War". RJ talks a lot about Atari knowing they were in a bind and offering less than $1 / share, and working out a last minute deal w/ Commodore for $4.25, then paying off Atari. --Chuck

Looked like Curt responded to this, but it didn't come through in my digest. So just in case... Jack would take legal action on anything if it served him as a decent weapon. Don't forget that Commodore was already suing him claiming stealing of trade secrets as such. Regardless, Curt is right - R.J. is way off the mark and talking a lot incorrect info. Yes, after the fact. From my own talks with a member of the family, when they took over Atari they had no knowlege of the Amiga deal. Their ST had nothing to do with the Amiga technology nor was there any plan to use such technology. That was Warner's Atari Inc. They basicly discovered the Amiga deal when they were going through all the programs and projects during their "evaluation" stage before chopping and shutting stuff down. It became a key weapon to get Commodore to drop their own lawsuit against Jack and TTL. ~> That was June actually, if I'm not mistaken. Again, they didn't know anything about Amiga when they took over the company. Actually, Commodore's proceedings with Amiga start around the time Jack was taking over Atari. Atari's suit wasn't announced until August. Commodore actually sent the first strike by suing members of Jack's team that July. With that in mind, when they discovered the Amiga deal it only makes sense that he would use it as a counter strike knowing his "business is war" strategy. Interstingly, Joe Decuir was caught in the crossfire of all this - he was working at Atari again as a contract engineer on the 1090 expansion box at the time of the takeover. Again, this is more R.J. b.s. See above. The ST was a good 90% done by the time Jack bought Atari. Most of the work done during the Atari period I believe was the OS/Software portion. Marty

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: "Business is war." ;) I have no sympathy for Tramiel. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

At 02:07 PM 3/4/2005, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: That's the RJ I know! :-) - John

Eh? Speak up! On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, John Allain wrote: -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

But that's obviously not the case. The lineage to DEC OS's (OS/8, DOS-11, RT-11, and all of their predecessors) is obvious. Tim.

At 10:57 AM 3/4/2005, cswiger wrote: It's discussed in some of the linked references in the Slashdot discussion. One suggestion was that / was used as a prefix for command modifiers (/X /A etc.) so it would be slightly harder to parse. Certainly command arguments preceded folders, both in CP/M and QDOS. Not many people know this, but at low levels in old Mac OS, they used ":" as a folder separator in file specifiers. - John

On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 13:36 -0500, Steve Jones wrote: Acorn's DFS is :drive.dir.filename - but dir can only be a single character (and directories can't be nested). What about Commodore machines - did they support directories at all? Most things of that era seem to work at the partition / file level and ignore the concept of directories altogether. Isn't it just machine:unix-path ? Can't remember now, although I may be attempting an install of DomainOS tomorrow so will be finding out pretty soon ;) (I do have manuals, just not here) cheers Jules

Nope at least on PETs etc, you only had the root directory of a disk to play with. The ICL DRS20 I used at college had $drive-directory.filename for syntax, so a typical file was $0-foo.prog.cbl. I think. Bear in mind I've not touched a DRS system for 20+ years :) Is there a full DRS20 at BP? I know the terminal is there but is the big twin floppy box? -- adrian/witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UKs biggest home computer collection?

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Ron Hudson wrote: CP/M-80 2.xx up had USER numbers. Anyone ever find a real use for it? Besides losing files?

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Eric Smith wrote: Users? Your computers had users?! MP/M?

Once you added a hard drive they were essential. I tended to segregate by language, (i.e. BASIC would be user 1, FORTRAN would be user 2, C would be user 3, Turbo Pascal would be user 4) Without them you'd never be able to find a file. Eric

Steve> Let us say, "not many average Mac users." Though limiting it Steve> to "average XYZ users" leaves the named group open to Steve> accusations of all manner of ignorance and stupidity... ;^) Even in Mac OS X you can still see this -- various applications show colon-separated file names in the "recently opened files" list. MS Word, for example. Steve> So, what else have we got out there for file/directory path Steve> separators? We've got DEC's "DEVICE:[DIR.SUB]FILE.TXT;1" and Steve> uhm... actually, I can't think of the conventions for any Steve> others at the moment. Can anybody think of any interesting Steve> ones? I can't remember what DomainOS did, but I remember it Steve> striking me when I learned of it. Mainframes? RTOSes? OS/360 didn't have any, because it didn't have directories. Same for various other operating systems, like CDC's. I forgot if Burroughs had them. TOPS-20: DEV:<DIR.SUB>FILE.TXT.1 -- and VMS accepts that syntax too, or at least much of it (. for version separator, certainly). TOPS-10: DEV:[nnn,nnn]FILE.TXT (no version) -- RSTS and RSX and DOS ditto through RSX had octal numbers while RSTS and TOPS were decimal. paul

On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 13:36:56 -0500, Steve Jones <classiccmp at crash.com> wrote: I didn't know about the shell, but I did learn about the ":" back in the old days, when I tried to use my VAX-11/725 as a nightly backup machine for my mother's typing shop full of Macintoshes. The idea was to run each modem serial line down to the basement where the VAX was, and with each Mac Plus or Mac SE (total of 3 to 5), running CKermit in server mode, have Kermit on VMS copy files from a working directory to a special place on the RC25. Unfortunately, it was a bit beyond my skills at the time, and the tools I had available to me. But I did notice to navigate the filesystem on the Mac from the VAX, I had to use ":" as the path separator. This was circa 1987. I probably still wouldn't know this bit of trivia except for playing with Kermit that time. -ethan

cswiger wrote: I think CP/M had used the '/' in the name CP/M so they had to use '\' instead. :) I have not used CP/M but it could be the fact / was used as a flag for single letter comand line arguments and a disk ( only floppies ) was supported with NO file directories so you had no problem with '\' for paths. Still you can't tar Mr Gates since part of the blame was intel suporting 8080 translating programs to convert 8080 source code into 8088 code and having to keep all the fun features like CP/M. Ben alias woodelf

On Mar 4, 2005, at 9:57 AM, cswiger wrote: Because '/' was already used for command options (ala RT-11, etc.). They _could_ have used a directory syntax like VMS, TOPS-10, and other DEC -- DSK:[MFD.UFD.UFD...]file.ext or DSK:file.ext[UFD.UFD.UFD...] TOPS-10 variant or TOPS-20: DSK:<UFD.UFD...>file.ext or ITS: UFD;FILE EXT :-) Mike

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, cswiger wrote: Some asshole. But, throughout all my DOS years I used - as the switch character which told MSDOS to use / as a directory character. In CONFIG.SYS: SWITCHAR=-

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Peter C. Wallace wrote: MSDOS never got better than this for me: * Bunch of extended, or is that expanded? memory (could never remember which stupid marketing euphemism was which) * huge, giant 100MB disk * ARCnet * MSDOS (not PCDOS) 3 I think * 4DOS * desqview * qmms * pmate, lattice C small model, plink (for overlays), masm That stuff ran just fine. Had a bunch of machines on 10base2 ARCnet. I got a lot of stuff down with that setup. It was all downhill from there for me until I found 386bsd. freeBSD is now as good as that (meaning, comfort, concentrate on work not farting around with the system, reliability).

It's easy to remember : exPanded memory is Paged -tony

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Jim Leonard wrote: Yeah, why use OS services? They just get in the way!

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Jim Leonard wrote: Well that's perfectly true. It all seems so haphazard in retrospect.

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 11:57:29 -0500 (EST), cswiger <cswiger at widomaker.com> wrote: My recollection of that is that Paul Allen took "credit" for the directory pathname char choice ( (MS-DOS 1.0 didn't have sub-directories, so it surely wasn't Tim Patterson). I also have a dim memory that he apologized to the world for it and promised never to do it again. -ethan

Fred wrote: Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton wrote the low-level disk routines, named "RWTS" (Read-Write Track & Sector). The File Manager, BASIC interface, and dsik backup utility were contracted to Shepardson Microsystems and written by Paul Laughton. Eric