Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!ncar!tank!oddjob!gargoyle!att!alberta!auvax!rwa
From: rwa@auvax.UUCP (Ross Alexander)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: New ST ROMS (and breaking old applications)
Summary: I must agree
Keywords: gemdos,patch
Message-ID: <703@auvax.UUCP>
Date: 23 Aug 88 08:04:18 GMT
References: <525@nikhefh.hep.nl>
Organization: Athabasca U., Alberta, Canada
Lines: 34

In article <525@nikhefh.hep.nl>, gert@nikhefh.hep.nl (Gert Poletiek) writes:
[many quite reasonable and verifiably true observations elided]
> And PLEASE, don't say that the OS is documented in the developers
> package. Even the GemDos 'manual' that goes with it contains bugs.

Yes.  Atari, please _Excite Me_ once again;  build a 68030 box or something.
It's hard to maintain momentum on a 68000 based box obsessed with the past.
Our institution (a university, charged with moulding the minds of poor
sob's (read "students")) doesn't really think your stuff is very interesting
anymore.  Honestly, any 80[23]86 box is more interesting from an academic
viewpoint, especially if aforementioned academic is trying to use the
box as a platform for CAI or CAL delivered from a central server; where's
the equivalent of Sun's PC-NFS ?  Replies of 'well, there\'s Moses\'
Promise-LAN' will be met with derision (not my own; the users can manage
some things quite handily on their own ;-).

And further more, you can't argue that you're working against a huge
retroactive force ( an arguement that I*M can use with perfect sincerity).
Really, my impression of the installed Atari {520,1040} base is twofold:
games fiends, who run the same binaries _over and over_, and who don't
know Malloc from SetPhysBase (:-), and very knowledgable hackers to
whom a change in memory allocation semantics would be an upgrade, not
an obstacle.

ps (to Allan Pratt): since I never mentioned an implementation,
but only an implementation _strategy_, I feel that your comments re 'But
that won\'t work' et c. are a little bit premature; I never specified
how it would work, only what the GOALS were.  At the same time, I don't have
the exhaustive knowledge of TOS innards that you have (painfully ? :-)
mastered; maybe there's no way.  But believe me, I _did_ spend some time
thinking about implementation; p'rhaps we should talk? (Not really;
I'll bet that in the long run your hacks will do beautifully).

--
Ross Alexander @ Athabasca University