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From: peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari,net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: In defense of J. Demar (Bit longer than I wanted)
Message-ID: <297@graffiti.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 13-Oct-85 10:42:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: graffiti.297
Posted: Sun Oct 13 10:42:03 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Oct-85 06:31:09 EDT
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Xref: linus net.micro.atari:1304 net.micro.amiga:4251

> JD(cont):...the amiga has a non-standard disk configuration and does
> 	much of the disk support in software (ie. slow). The drives have
> 	slightly more capacity than the the ST's DS drives (880K to 720K) but
> 	this is at the expense of speed. The Amiga directory format (or
> 	lack of) is done much like a commodore-64. In fact, to get a
> 	directory, the Amiga goes out and finds a program called DIR,
> 	loads it and goes back searching!
> 
> I:	If that is true, I have lost all respect for AmigaDOS.

I think what he means to say is that "DIR" is an external program, like UNIX'
ls, not a built-in like MS-DOS' "dir". To get a directory in CLI it loads
a file called ":/c/Dir" and executes it. Since there are disks without CLI *or*
dir on them, and they do have directories, it's pretty obvious that they're
not hidden inside a program. Especially not one that's itself 2 levels deep
in the directory tree. I would like to suggest that Mr. Demar is less than
well acquainted with the machine...

And why wasn't net.micro.amiga included in the distribution of this message?
Maybe because some people who actually *have* an Amiga and understand it are
more likely to respond to it?

Anyway... you can regain your respect for AMIGAdos. It's not UNIX by any means,
but it is certainly an improvement over Crummy-Dos, Trash-Dos, Messy-Dos, or
any of the other little computer "operating systems".