On 16 June 2016 at 21:35, Sean Conner <s...@conman.org> wrote: > It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated: >> On 14 June 2016 at 01:56, Sean Conner <s...@conman.org> wrote: > >> > What do you feel is still missing from OS-X today? About the only thing >> > I >> > can think of is the unique file system, where each file had a data and a >> > resource fork. >> >> * The clean, totally CLI-less nature of it. Atari ST GEM imitated this, >> but it had the DOS-like legacy baggage of drive letters etc. > > So did the Amiga and it didn't have the baggage of drive letters. > > Okay, so it had drive names. Instead of > > A:\path\to\file > > it had: > > DF0:path/to/file > > But you also had logical drive names. Give the drive the name "Fred" and > you could reference a file as: > > Fred:path/to/file > > A nice side effect is that if there was no disk with the name of "Fred" > installed, AmigaOS would pop up a dialog box asking for the user to insert > the disk named "Fred". It wouldn't matter what physical drive you popped > the disk into, AmigaOS would find it. And, if you copied the files off the > disk Fred to the harddrive, say: > > DH1:applications/local/fred > > you could do > > assign Fred=DH1:applications/local/fred > > and there you go. I find that nicer than environment variables in that it's > invisible to applications---the OS handles it for you.
Thanks for the explanation. That's more detail than I've ever read before. I never used my A1200 much. I put a 68030 in it, mainly as it was the cheapest way to add more Fast RAM -- but the biggest SIMM I could physically fit was an 8MB one. I have 16MB FP-mode DRAM SIMMs in various 680x0 Macs, but they're double-sided and won't fit. I fitted a 400MB IDE hard disk -- the drive cost less than the special cable -- and managed somehow to bodge and fumble my way through installing AmigaOS 3.1 on it. And there I left it. I hope it still works when I remove it from storage! I cherish some hope that AROS makes headway and becomes a usable OS. It strikes me that it'd be a good fit for the many low-end cheap ARM devices appearing now, such as the Raspberry Pi. > Personally, I like CLIs, but I'm used to them from the start. And for > some work flows, I find its faster and easier than a graphical system. Yes, me too. I am happy at a shell prompt and in a GUI. Most OSes that have the latter also have the former, and many have only a CLI, of course. It was just interesting to use machines that had a rich GUI and not even vestiges of a CLI, such as are visible in ST GEM. >> >> I wish the Star Trek project had come to some kind of fruition. >> >> >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project >> > >> > Reading that, it sounds like it would have been much like early >> > Windows---an application that would run on top of MS-DOS (or in this case, >> > DR-DOS). >> >> My impression is that DR-DOS would have been a bootloader, little more. > > Then why even bother with DR-DOS then? I don't know. I think few people outside Apple have ever even seen the code. Perhaps, like A/UX, it had terminal windows which could run console-mode DOS apps? -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
