Re: MS-DOS FST?

[jlcooper@sacam.OREN.ORTN.EDU (Jonathan L Cooper)]

Jim Murphy (murph@apple.com) wrote:
>In article <1993May1.145408.25982@ornl.uucp> Jonathan L Cooper,
>jlcooper@sacam.OREN.ORTN.EDU writes:
>>So, did anyone but me think that Jim Murphy seems to have implied rather
>>indirectly that the MS-DOS FST will not be read-only?
>     Nope, I didn't try to imply that. You're reading too much into what
>I said. If the FST can both read and write, I'd come out and say it,
>plain and simple. :-)

ok.  i thought is was probably reading a bit much into it, but i was
hoping...  :)  i had forgotten that apple releases all product info of
consequence well in advance of ship date these days.  :)

i'm in the rather interesting position of trying to put together a gs
system on a near-zero budget, since the family machine has to stay at home
this fall when i leave for grad school.  i'm trying to decide just how
essential it is to have a floppy drive on a gs at all.  (i _could_ just
stick it in the powerbook, copy it to the hd, and put it on the net...)

>>He suggested that the FST will handle 800K MS-DOS format disks.  If this
>>is true, the only way to format such a disk would be on an Apple IIgs. 
>>PC exchange on the mac only wants to format 720K, and doesn't seem to
>>support 800K disks.  IBM hardware doesn't support it.
>     Well, the reason I mentioned 800K disks was for theory only. The FST
>can handle any media that's formatted MS-DOS, however, some combinations
>(such as an 800K Apple disk) would be pretty useless. For example, I took
>a disk image of an MS-DOS disk (which was created on the Macintosh) and
>extracted it to a 1,440K RAM disk on my GS. The FST could read from it
>quite well, it's just not a very useful thing to do.

somebody else mentioned that an 800K ms-dos disk was a possibility with a
pc transporter.  will the FST read these?

>>He also talks about resource fork support.  If the FST will be read-only,
>>the only reason to bother implementing the code will be pulling mac
>>TrueType fonts off of MS-DOS disks.  :)
>    The FST supports the PC Exchange format of storing resource files so
>that as much information as possible can be preserved when reading files.
>Presently the only use would be when reading files that PC Exchange had
>written, so again, the usefulness of this feature at present can be seen
>as somewhat limited.

_if_ i get a floppy drive, i'll be able to use it, but it won't really
help me much.  i have the option of running the stuff through a mac
anyway.  i don't see any reason to bother getting a low-density floppy
drive these days.

oh well, thanks for confirming the bad news.  :)

and good luck on system 6.0.2, with the read-write ms-dos FST.  :)

>Jim Murphy        Apple II System Software Engineer        murph@apple.com

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Jonathan Cooper                   |	If all the world's a stage,
jlcooper@sacam.oren.ortn.edu      |	what am I doing in the 
jon.cooper@lambada.oit.unc.edu    |	light booth?
cz339@cleveland.Freenet.Edu       |
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