Importing binary files without removable storage nor non-bundled software (was: TKermitFTP - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

6 Jan 2005

...
 From: "Vintage Computer Festival"
&lt;vcf(a)siconic.com&gt;

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

  Vintage Computer Festival declared on Wednesday
05 January 2005 11:19 pm:
  On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Pete Turnbull wrote:
  Dunno, I don't have quite such old versions
:-)  My old copy of "The
 MS-DOS Bible" says "every version" -- it means 3.30 and older --
 disallows binary reads from devices.  The same message is at 5254 in
 MS-DOS 3.30 (ditto in PC-DOS 3.30), at 4CA0 in 3.21, and 4CCC in
 IBM-DOS 4.01 (from a Compaq).  I can't read my MS-DOS 2.10 and 2.11
 disks on the hardware I have here.  "Binary reads from a device are
 not allowed" is the message at 8753 in DR-DOS 3.41. 
 The question I haven't seen answered yet is, "Well, why the hell
 not???" 
 Well, my guess would be that it has no way to determine the EOF coming
 over the line, as it can't just "check the file length", unless
there's
 a ^Z there to indicate it.  Thus, ASCII mode is needed. 
And the programmers were not smart enough to figure a way around this
because...why? 
Hi
 It would have been trivial for them to adopt a simple
block transfer for serial binary at the begining. I suspect
that the reason they didn't do this was that they didn't
wan't people to transfer programs from machine to machine.
Can you imaging. 1 million people with computers and they
only sold one OS.
Dwight