Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!killer!tness7!tness1!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: ports
Keywords: serial parallel
Message-ID: <2007@sugar.UUCP>
Date: 17 May 88 03:43:01 GMT
References: <4039@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 50

In article ... richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) writes:
> In article <2002@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
> {stuff} [Actually a bunch of stuff about how he didn't seem to understand
           a word I wrote. It doesn't seem to have caught. ]

> Ok, Peter. ONE LAST, and FINAL TIME:

Really? Ready when you are, Dick. You still seem a little uptight. Bad day
at the office?

> When you can convice all peripheral manufacturors to use serial only,
> and can get rid of all the parallel devices in the known universe then
> we can talk about machines that only come with serial port(s).

Well, I'm trying. It really helps when I get accused of being a dictator.
I reserve flames like *that* for IBM.

> Until such time as that is true, the only seinsible thing for a computer
> manufacturor to do is to supply one of each.

Except for IBM, this is true.

> I found it pretty amusing that when you had a badly aligned floppy
> drive you wanted commodore to change the filesystem to accomidate
> all your bad disks.

Actually, I still have the same floppy disk drive (drives, actually. Both
apparently out of alignment by exactly the same amount) and I haven't
aligned it. I did suspect a Delay(0) problem for a while, but I ran Markus'
Delay(0) trapper and never got a beep.

I've just come to accept that I'm going to get screwed over by the file system.
I have never had as many reliability problems since the time I had to do 
software development on the assembly floor in all the dust & heat & stuff.
A write error shouldn't lose a file (the bad block mapping should select a
new block), and disk errors shouldn't cause a guru (0x8700000BL, which
comes out to AN_KeyRange|AT_DeadEnd).

The "Fix" for the file system turned out to be enough memory that I didn't
hit the disks very often.

> And now that you want one more serial port you want the world to abolish
> parallel ports.

Oh no, I've wanted that since the late '70s. Way before I ever got a computer
with a parallel port. From messages on the net I don't seem to be the only one.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva      `-_-'      ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter
-- "Have you hugged your U wolf today?" ...!bellcore!tness1!sugar!peter
-- Disclaimer: These may be the official opinions of Hackercorp.