Re: Apple model history?

["Roger Johnstone" <rojaws@es.co.nz>]

----------
In article <1e8zu2x.1wlb7k31cpyomuN%dempson@actrix.gen.nz>,
dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) wrote:


>Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net> wrote:
>
>> CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney) wrote:
>> 
>> > On Sun, 09 Apr 2000 12:57:50 +0900, Paul Guertin <pg@sff.net> wrote:
>> > 
>> > >From what I understand, ProDOS is a rewrite of the Apple III operating
>> > >system SOS. Without the III (and therefore without ProDOS), the
>> > >transition from floppies- to HD-based Apple II systems would have been
>> > >more chaotic.
>> > 
>> > If they created SOS for the Apple III, what makes you think they
>> > wouldn't have created it for the Apple II?
>> 
>> Without the SOS code to work from, writing ProDOS would have taken
>> more time, and vendor-patched DOS 3.3 could have become a standard
>> difficult to dislodge. Maybe.
>
>Definitely.  It was well on the way.
>
>> One thing about ProDOS, or rather Basic.system -- how come there is
>> no equivalent of the "cd .." command, to go up one level in the
>> directory hierarchy? I've always found that odd.
>
>Me too.  It isn't too hard to do in a program (search backwards for a
>slash), but seems like a rather glaring oversight.
>
>> Almost as odd as DOS 3.3 having a two-letter command for a seldom-used
>> function (FP) but a seven-letter CATALOG command.
>
>How many times did others here type 'CATAKIG' by accident?


My problem is that I can go weeks between using the ProDOS BASIC command
line, but I use MS-DOS at work every few days (I use a Mac at home for most
stuff, no CLI). When I sit down at an Apple II the first thing I do is type
DIR instead of CAT! It normally takes a while for the brain to readjust.


>> > It isn't like there was something special about the Apple III hardware
>> > that made designing the operating system a task that was specific to
>> > only that machine.
>> 
>> Agreed, but before the III, did anyone at Apple see the need to write
>> a sophisticated, HD-compatible operating system for the II, and act
>> on it? Hm... I suppose the Apple Pascal OS might have been it.
>
>Hardly.  The Pascal file system rapidly becomes unusable as you increase
>the disk size, because it requires files to be contiguous, is limited to
>70 or so files, and doesn't support subdirectories.


Yes, but it certainly had advantages. You never had any file fragmentation
:-)


>They had to implement a horrible hack involving creating lots of small
>volumes to get Pascal working usefully with the 5 MB ProFile drive.
>
>Apple got it right with Apple /// Pascal, since it ran under SOS, with
>corresponding improvements to all the above details.
>
>-- 
>David Empson
>dempson@actrix.gen.nz
>Snail mail: P O Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand


I wish Apple had released a Pascal 2.0 running under ProDOS, I might have
been more interested in it then. Still, I suppose by the time it would have
been released there were already other Pascals that worked with ProDOS, it's
just that I was once _given_ Pascal 1.3, but I was already using a ProDOS
hard disk and going back to a floppy based file system to learn a new
language seemed like too much hassle.


Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~rojaws
------------------------------------------
My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.