Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!software.mitel.com!kim!kim From: kim@Software.Mitel.com (Kim Letkeman) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems Subject: Re: New Modems, Telebit Fails under impairments in PC Magazine tests Message-ID: Date: 17 Dec 90 12:18:31 GMT References: <1990Nov21.221114.11850@unixland.uucp> <1990Nov23.185029.2663@nstar <5791@holston.UUCP> <405@beagle.UUCP> <552@camco.Celestial.COM> Sender: kim@Software.Mitel.COM Organization: Public Switching, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario, Canada Lines: 68 In-reply-to: bill@camco.Celestial.COM's message of 14 Dec 90 17:59:49 GMT In article <552@camco.Celestial.COM> bill@camco.Celestial.COM (Bill Campbell) writes: | I find it difficult to believe anything I believe in the PC mags | where the editors think DOS is an operating system and BASIC a | programming language. | | That should get your attention and start a flame war! A flame war isn't necessary, since this statement is so obviously an opinion. Not that either DOS or BASIC are terribly good, but both are what they claim to be. | The problem is that these people have limited experience and | little knowledge of anything outside of the PC world. This is | going to show up more in a group dealing with communications since | DOS isn't very good at communications and communication implies | dealing with a multitude of systems and protocols. I think you probably mean that the PC BIOS is not particularly good at communications, since it has known problems in handling interrupts. DOS, on the other hand, is quite good at comms. It is possible to purchase a multitude of intelligent comms cards and it is possible to write device drivers and/or interrupt handlers that allow very high speed communications. In fact, I doubt that you could find a system that has more communications hardware and software readily available than DOS because of the huge independant vendor population. | Examples of this is the old 'Wordstar diamond' which used ctrl-s | for cursor control not realizing that this was x-off, and DOS | conventions of using a single ESC to cancel something where the | ESC character is generally the beginning of a sequence. The number of people using Wordstar over an RS-232 port versus the number using it at a console is so small that this example is a non-issue. Besides, GNU Emacs was written by a rather knowledgable person, and uses both ^S and ^Q as commands by default. What has the ESC convention got to do with DOS's ability to do communications? | This is OK so long as one stays withing the PC environment, but | causes problems when dealing with the rest of the world. If I'm | the only person around I can do anything I want, but if I live in | a community I need to get along with my neighbors. PCs have survived rather well along with the rest of the world. In fact, the latest stats and projections (Sept 24, 1990 issue of New York Times) show operating system market share as: Year DOS UNIX Windows OS/2 1987 88.2 2.6 2.3 0.3 1989 75.0 2.3 14.5 1.7 1994 43.2 7.6 28.7 13.5 As well, the BBS and on-line information market was created by PCs. | The PC magazines and users need to be educated and learn that | there is a big world out there that isn't afflicted with 640K | memory barriers, 32Meg disk limits, or any of the other idiocy | foisted on the world by IBM. Perhaps others could see that DOS has done much more good than harm to those that use computers in everyday life. That too would be an education. -- Kim Letkeman kim@software.mitel.com uunet!mitel!spock!kim