Re: Happy 30th Birthday to Disk ][ and Apple DOS

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <4876CD6E.3193.usenet_csa2@a2central.com>,
BluPhoenyx <bluphoenyx@a2central.com.remove-b6c-this> wrote:
>  To: pausch
>pausch wrote:
>> In article <34166fcd-a44e-40dc-9fa3-e510c928dfbc@26g2000hsk.googlegroups.com>,
>> mdj  <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Jul 10, 11:15=A0pm, pau...@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dunno about that either - both PET and TRS-80 had floppy disk storage
>>>> too, as well as a number of CP/M computers from that time.  CP/M even
>>>> *required* disk storage of some kind. =A0No, what put the Apple ][ ahead 
>>> in
>>>> the competition was its open architecture, which created a third party
>>>> market which soon made lots of hardware and software available for the ][
>>> .
>>>> And the entry of Apple ][ into the business market was due to one single
>>>> software package: VisiCalc ....
>>> But really, the Disk ][ was fast, simple, and therefore cheap. The
>>> controller was not only industry changing, but a work of art.
>> 
>> Sure it was!  But the Apple II didn't become popular mainly due to its
>> relatively cheap disk drives, other factors were more important IMHO.
>> 
>> 
>>>> Apple DOS didn't even have a decent command line! Only a very restricted
>>>> syntax of the command line was allowed by Apple DOS - other needed input
>>>> parameters had to be obtained though a user dialogue by the application
>>>> itself, or perhaps through some data (text) file. Compare this with the
>>>> very flexible command line interface of CP/M (which was directly inherited
>>>> by MS-DOS): after the name of the executable file you could type almost
>>>> anything you wanted. CP/M and MS-DOS didn't object, it simply passed it
>>>> on to the application and then it was up to the application to try to make
>>>> sense of the command line, and to determine whether it was legal or illegal.
>>> It's a shame this was never fixed - 10 years later the Apple II
>>> 'prompt' had much the same limitations.
>> 
>> That's the perils of "backwards compatibility".  ProDOS inherited pretty
>> much of Apple DOS's command line syntax.
>> 
>>> Matt
>> 
>> 
>
>In reality, ProDOS didn't inherit those issues, only the Apple supplied 
>shell BASIC.SYSTEM did. There are a number of other shell systems which 
>offer very good cli parameter passing, simple pipes or other things. The 
>problem is most folks don't know enough about them or take the time to 
>learn and use them. For BASIC folks, it might still pay off to use a 
>system like Davex or ECP8 which transparently launch Applesoft programs. 
>However, when developing Applesoft you tend to be stuck in the same old 
>BASIC shell with a few extras. This is where some well selected commands 
>come in handy. FWIW, you can pass a limited command line to add on BASIC 
>commands and even use BASIC.SYSTEM to help parse some of it. It has 
>however been awhile since I've done this.
>
>Cheers,
>Mike T.

Thans for your correction!

Likewise, CP/M and MS-DOS didn't define the syntax of the command line,
only the shell (i.e. CCP in CP/M or COMMAND.COM in MS-DOS) did.  There were
other shell systems around, such as ZCPR (for CP/M) or MS-Windows 3
(for MS-DOS).



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