Quadra 660AV what's with the "PowerPC" label?

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Fri Jun 17 08:57:17 CDT 2016


On 16 June 2016 at 21:35, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
>> 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.
>
>   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.

Thanks for the explanation. That's more detail than I've ever read before.

I never used my A1200 much. I put a 68030 in it, mainly as it was the
cheapest way to add more Fast RAM -- but the biggest SIMM I could
physically fit was an 8MB one. I have 16MB FP-mode DRAM SIMMs in
various 680x0 Macs, but they're double-sided and won't fit.

I fitted a 400MB IDE hard disk -- the drive cost less than the special
cable -- and managed somehow to bodge and fumble my way through
installing AmigaOS 3.1 on it.

And there I left it. I hope it still works when I remove it from storage!

I cherish some hope that AROS makes headway and becomes a usable OS.
It strikes me that it'd be a good fit for the many low-end cheap ARM
devices appearing now, such as the Raspberry Pi.


>   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.

Yes, me too. I am happy at a shell prompt and in a GUI. Most OSes that
have the latter also have the former, and many have only a CLI, of
course. It was just interesting to use machines that had a rich GUI
and not even vestiges of a CLI, such as are visible in ST GEM.

>> >> 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).
>>
>> My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more.
>
>   Then why even bother with DR-DOS then?

I don't know. I think few people outside Apple have ever even seen the code.

Perhaps, like A/UX, it had terminal windows which could run
console-mode DOS apps?

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)


More information about the cctalk mailing list