Re: DOS 3.3 File Compression

[magnusfalkirk <dean.phares@gmail.com>]

On Dec 4, 3:22 pm, schmidtd <schmi...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> Yeah, me too. :-)  And I think there are a couple of schools of
> thought on this - and it seems to depend somewhat on the length of
> time you've been in the community.
>
> There is the .shk/.bxy/.sdk crowd with physical hardware connected in
> some way to the real world.  The .shk/.bxy/.bsc/.sdk are natural means
> of working natively with individual files in ProDOS and fairly large
> volumes (i.e. hard drives).  Tools like ShrinkIt, etc. make it easy to
> decompress things in situ.  Similarly, CiderPress (Windows only) makes
> it easy to decompress those packages on modern computers as well; but
> then you have the need to transport an individual file or files down
> to the Apple in order to make it useful.
>
> Then there is the latecomer crowd, perhaps brought up on emulators.  A
> more natural mode of transfer for them is the whole-disk(ette) image,
> which makes files on it immediately visible once mounted.  Zipped
> whole-disk images are easy to unzip and drop on the emulator of
> choice, for example.  So even transferring a single file is easy with
> the common envelope of the .dsk or .po wrapper.
>
> So I think you have (at least) two common use cases here.  That's
> reflected in the file repository sites like ground and asmiov -
> there's a mishmash of .zip, .gz, .bxy, .dsk, .sdk, .shk... did I get
> them all?? :-)

David,

I'd say there is a third school of thought, though we are probably a
minority. That is people who started out with Apple II's, in my case a
II+, moved up the Apple II line and eventually moved on Macs, and are
now coming back to the II.

A few months after I threw away my original GS, and all of my software
because I some how blew out the motherboard, I discovered emulators
for my Mac and was happy to play Apple II games on it. What got me
back to the real hardware was picking up an Apple IIe system at an
estate auction 2 years ago. So to me it doesn't matter how the files
are compressed as long as I'm able to open them up and use them again.

Dean