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From: gl8f@astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Where can I get TOS 1.4 (disk version)?
Message-ID: <1990Jun15.164436.6636@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 15 Jun 90 16:44:36 GMT
References: <707@hexagon.pkmab.se> <1990Jun14.155316.10045@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1965@electro.UUCP>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
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In article <1965@electro.UUCP> ignac@electro.UUCP (Ignac Kolenko) writes:
>>
>>And then someone would patch it, and someone would patch the patches,
>>and then who would know what we end up with? Yes, I can deal with this
>
>huh? MSDOS, i believe, never went through all this, and it was a disk
>based OS.

Well, that's because TOS and MSDOS provide different levels of
features. The serial I/O routines under MS-DOS are sadly broken and
still are, so nobody ever used the MS-DOS routines and they write
their own drivers, especially for high-speed modems (e.g. FOSSIL). On
the ST it's possible to run the serial ports at 19.2 kbaud using the
serial port, so people go ahead and use TOS -- except a patch was
needed to get rts/cts to work.

So the difference between MS-DOS and TOS in that case was that nobody
expected MS-DOS to provide that service, so application programmers
wrote around it. On the ST, a system program patch was used.

MS-DOS 2.X has the same slow FAT allocation that GEMDOS has, but
nobody ever bothered to fix it during the several years that 2.X was
out before 3.X was released. Perhaps nobody cared.

Yes, TOS on disk would provide a means for fast distribution of
updated versions. But as I keep on saying, repeating yourself
repeatedly saying you want something that they don't provide won't get
you anywhere, but it sure makes reading this newsgroup hell.

--
"Perhaps I'm commenting a bit cynically, but I think I'm qualified to."
                                              - Dan Bernstein