Re: Is ProDOS supported in OSX?

[Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net>]

In article <hBMJa.165789$eJ2.91515@fed1read07>,
 salfter@salfter.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter) wrote:

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> In article <f2MJa.4902$%3.259852@typhoon.sonic.net>,
> Don Bruder  <dakidd@sonic.net> wrote:
> >In article <5JHJa.165291$eJ2.6799@fed1read07>,
> > salfter@salfter.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter) wrote:
> >> In article <kzxJa.4734$%3.257001@typhoon.sonic.net>,
> >> Don Bruder  <dakidd@sonic.net> wrote:
> >> >Why SHOULD a state-of-the-art OS even make so much as a token ATTEMPT to
> >> >support a filesystem that's been officially abandoned (never mind the 
> >> >fact
> >> >that the machine it was designed to run on hasn't been manufactured for
> >> >even longer) for almost 10 years?
> >> 
> >> Access to your older data, perhaps?
> >
> >If you've got data that old, that's important enough to need to be used 
> >on <insert your chosen system here> and hasn't been updated to being 
> >stored on <insert media compatible with your chosen system here> then, 
> >no offense intended, but quite bluntly, you're a damn fool. 
> 
> Who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?  In my case, there isn't
> anything particularly critical, and I still have plenty of machines that can
> read the disks I have.  (The IIGS is even networked through a GatorBox CS,
> so anything it can read can be forwarded to something more modern.)

Precisely... If your data is important enough, you can (and presumably 
will, should it come to that) dump it onto something that your "other 
gear".

> As for other people/organizations and their data, if it's a sufficiently
> large amount (like all those 9-track tapes that NASA has accumulated), it
> isn't always feasible to keep migrating the data to newer formats.

I've got exactly one word for that:
BALONEY! (You though I was gonna saay "bullshit", didn't you? :) )

Those 9-tracks you're talking about could be stuffed onto optical (CD or 
DVD) and stopped from deteriorating with little pain other than the 
actual time involved to actually do the process. On the way, they could 
have any number of format manipulations done to them to make them easier 
to access, and literally warehouse upon warehouse could be opened up for 
something more useful than storing piles of tape that are slowly 
degenerating into nothingness anyway. And I for one think NASA needs to 
get hot on doing *EXACTLY* that, before they lose something critical 
(without even knowing that it might be critical in the first place) to 
the bit-rot that's all but guaranteed to be taking place already. It was 
only a few years ago (10-ish?) that Boston (the band) triedtocut 
together their "Third Stage" album, only to find that much of the 
original material (stored on tapes, of course) had "gone bad" due to the 
intervening years. Only about 10 of them. NASA is looking at finding 
they've had the same thing happen (only in their case, I expect it will 
be "in spades", since some of those reels date back to before the 
moon-shots - not "just" 10 years) to data that can't be replaced with a 
simple "Hey guys! Let's head back into the studio and do it again." 
session.
 
> Maintaining some degree of backward compatibility (or at least a provision
> for adding it) is reasonable enough, don't you think?

No question, it's reasonable. But by the same token, is it reasonable to 
expect to remain backward-compatible with everything that's ever been 
done, however good, bad, or indifferent it might be? Especially when 
doing so will effectively "hold you back" from improvements that could 
have been added, if it weren't for the fact that you can't fit 'em 
inbecause you've got 429 flavors of legacy drivers already shoehorned 
into the code?
 
> Then again, you probably think that getting rid of floppy drives was a Good
> Idea...

Actually, at first, I thought it was the dumbest move that anybody had 
ever made. But then I got to thinking about it. And I honestly can't 
remember the last time I bothered to put a floppy disk into the drive of 
one of my (5 different floppy-equipped) Macs. Practically everything has 
grown to the point where a CD distribution is mandatory. And floppies, 
despite being nfity little widgets, are simply too small, capacity-wise, 
to hold anything meaningful anymore. One lousy quality MP3 would need 
what? 10 floppies? More? and what if you wanted it at a decent enough 
bit-rate to actually be intelligible, rather than just a wad of 
gabbling? 30 floppies? 50? more than that? Never mind fitting a bootable 
system folder on one since about 7.5.x...

So nowdays... Ehhh... Yeah, I'd have to agree it's at least not a *BAD* 
idea, even if it isn't a shining example of brilliance.

In the days of the II (and earlier Macs) floppies made *LOTS* of sense. 
*HUGE* amounts of sense. *MIND-BOGGLINGLY LARGE* quantities of sense. 
With the evolution of software (and frequently the files that the 
software produces) floppies are now *ALMOST* as practical as trying to 
commute from L.A. to New York on a daily basis - it's a neat concept,but 
it just isn't functional. 

When's the last time you saw a software release that would fit on 
anything smaller than a (far from universal) ZIP 100 disk? Even THOSE 
are too small for some of the graphics projects that people are trying 
to do! 

> never mind that it costs $5 to build it in at the factory vs.
> $50-$100 to plug in a USB floppy drive that doesn't work as well.  Not
> everybody is swept up by Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.

Personally, I'd like to slap Steve and his RDF... Bring back Woz! :) 

> (At least you didn't top-post...I'll have to give you credit for that. :-) )

Bubba, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. It had to have 
been *AT LEAST* the day before! :) :)

-- 
Don Bruder -  dakidd@sonic.net <--- Preferred Email - unmunged, SpamAssassinated
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