Re: Is ProDOS supported in OSX?

["M. Pender" <mpender@hotmail.com>]

Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net> wrote in message
news:L1QJa.4966$%3.261752@typhoon.sonic.net...
> In article <hBMJa.165789$eJ2.91515@fed1read07>,
>  salfter@salfter.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter) wrote:
> > 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.
>   ...
>
> 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.

That's *still* a lot of pain.  By your argument I should copy my 3.5" DSDD
floppies to 3.5" DSHD floppies because a new format is out because Apple is
too brain-dead to maintain compatibility with older media formats on the new
machines?

To me that's just an argument for buying a used Mac as opposed to a new one.

Given time, Apple will probably eliminate floppies entirely.  So then should
I transfer all my old files to Zip disk?  Or CDROM?  Or floptical? Or
magneto-optical?  Perhaps QIC-80 tape?

Your argument asks the user community to spend a lot of time and money based
on a guess as to which products are going to survive, when even the folks at
Apple don't always have a clue (e.g. Apple III, Apple Lisa, Apple IIc+,
etc.)

Failure to *offer* minimal backward compatibility is the stupidity of Apple,
not that of people who have a lot of media.

> > 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?

Perhaps Apple should think about improving the operating system so that
basic driver support doesn't have to be "shoehorned" into the code.

IMHO the problem is not the inherent stupidity in eliminating the floppy
drive, but in offering a 3.5" USB drive that doesn't support the same media
as the drive it supposedly replaces.

- Mike