Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!portal!atari!apratt
From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: GEMDOS History
Message-ID: <967@atari.UUCP>
Date: 2 Feb 88 20:34:55 GMT
References: <3005@drivax.UUCP>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 24

in article <3005@drivax.UUCP>, holloway@drivax.UUCP (Bruce Holloway) says:
> But then a systems programmer said that _he_ could write a new operating
> system in a month that would look just like MS-DOS from a functional
> standpoint, and would be great and perfect and peachy-keen. And he did -
> pretty much alone. And since Atari was in such a hurry, they took what we
> had before all the horrid problems in it cropped up.
> 
> And later we fixed all those problems and then forgot about it. I don't think
> there's anyone here still working on GEMDOS.

I take issue with the second paragraph: it took DRI (in the person of
that wonder-programmer mentioned above) a *long* time to come up with
anything new, and when they did, it still had bugs.  I noticed one in
the first day of testing it.  (Dirty buffers would get flushed to disk
at odd times, later than you expect.) We (Atari) decided not to trade a
set of known bugs for a set of unknown ones, so we didn't adopt this
"DOS 1.1" from DRI. 

While there may be nobody at DRI working on GEMDOS, there sure is somebody
at Atari working on it.  Stay tuned for more details.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt