Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!columbia!rutgers!uwvax!oddjob!hao!hplabs!hp-pcd!uoregon!markv
From: markv@uoregon.UUCP (Mark VandeWettering)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: In defense of DOS 3.0 (was DOS 2.5 vs. DOS 3.0)
Message-ID: <508@uoregon.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Mar-87 02:40:58 EST
Article-I.D.: uoregon.508
Posted: Mon Mar 16 02:40:58 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Mar-87 03:43:10 EST
References: <8703131800.AA27415@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <102@osupyr.UUCP>
Reply-To: markv@drizzle.UUCP (Mark VandeWettering)
Distribution: world
Organization: University of Oregon, Computer Science, Eugene OR
Lines: 37

In article <102@osupyr.UUCP> akw@osupyr.UUCP (FarOff MicroDesigns) writes:

>	Get DOS 2.5.  You do *NOT* (I repeat _not_) want version 3.0.  Even
>though the old Atari had good intentions when it wrote this poor program,
>it is now quite a huge pain-in-the-booty.  It is _not_ compatible with the
>older versions of DOS and not compatible with other third-party DOSs as
>well.
	
	Granted.  It is certainly not compatible with DOS2.5, 2.0 or
	pretty damn near anything else.

>	A good reason to avoid 3.0 is this:  all other versions of DOS
>written by Atari format the disk in 128 byte sectors.  3.0 uses a
>1024 byte sector routine.  So, if you were to, say, write a file that is
>1025 bytes long, 3.0 will force the use of two sectors, resulting in the
>loss of 1023 bytes on your disk (which would be trivial on other systems but
>since 3.0 can only put ~90,000 bytes on a disk, this eats room FAST.
	
	Atari 2.0 does the same thing, except with a finer granularity.
	DOS 3.0 kills you if you have lots of teensy files, but really
	doesn't hurt much otherwise.  If you combine that with the
	append bug that I mentioned in an earlier article, it really
	gets bad.  I have wasted far more space with the append bug than
	any other problem.

	By all means, use spartados if you have a doubler.  Use MYDOS or
	2.5 if you need 2.0 compatibility.  I still use 3.0 for most of
	my programming, and have suffered no ill effects.  It really
	isn't all that bad.

	Long life to the 8-bit users!

-- 
|                       Mark VandeWettering                             |
|   member of UO-EXODOS - distributed operating system research group   |
|   University of Oregon Computer and Information Sciences Department   |
|               markv@uoregon.edu OR markv@uoregon.uucp                 |