Re: Is ProDOS supported in OSX?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <hBMJa.165789$eJ2.91515@fed1read07>,
Scott Alfter <salfter@salfter.dyndns.org> 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.)
 
He had a point though: if your old date aren't important, then why
bother moving it on to newer media?  Go on using your old equipment;
when it eventually stops working, well it was fun as long as it lasted,
wasn't it?
 
> 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.
 
Actually, NASA had a project some 6-8 years ago of moving all these
magnetic tape data to CD's.  They encountered two difficulties:
 
1. Finding equipment able to read these tapes (some of which were older
than 9-track tapes -- before them there were 7-track tapes for instance,
which required a different tape station) wasn't easy.
 
2. And when these tape stations had been found, some of these old
tapes had become so brittle that they did break when being read!!!
 
Reason 2. is enough to move the old data on to newer media, instead
of supporting obsolete tape stations: the lifetime of recording
media is finite.
 
Also: the "enormous amounts" of data on these tapes were enormous
back then -- but compared to today's media it wasn't that enormous....
As someone else pointed out here, you could store data from some
30 of the most high-capacity of these 9-track tapes onto one
single-layer DVD disk.  And a lot of those 9-track tapes had
considerably smaller data storage capacity -- hundreds of those
tapes would fit on one DVD.
 
> Maintaining some degree of backward compatibility (or at least a
> provision for adding it) is reasonable enough, don't you think?
 
If the data aren't particularly important, certainly !!!!!
 
> Then again, you probably think that getting rid of floppy drives was a Good
> Idea...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.
 
OTOH you can settle for PC's rather than Mac's.  Backwards compatibility
wasn't the strongest point of the Macintosh....
 
-- 
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