Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!cthulhu
From: cthulhu@athena.mit.edu (Jim Reich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Apple //GS, words from their world
Message-ID: <9812@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 14 Mar 89 01:39:51 GMT
References: <1981NU140487@NDSUVM1>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: cthulhu@athena.mit.edu (Jim Reich)
Lines: 64

In article <1981NU140487@NDSUVM1> NU140487@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Me) writes:
>
>     All of us Amiga owners can sit back and chuckle to ourselves when we
>listen to the woes of GS owners, huh? I gotta tell you, I didn't find myself
>lauging. In fact, it just got me even more steamed up at how downright PISS-
>POOR the OS for the Amiga actually is!!
Whoa -- gotta make a distinction here.  The Amiga's FILESYSTEM is piss-poor.
The operating system is actually top-rate for a micro -- arguably in the
same class with UNIX...
>     As an Apple // owner as well as an Amiga owner, I have had a bit of ex-
>perience in using Dos 3.2, dos 3.3, pronto dos, ProDOS, Prodos 8, and a bit
Ever tried to load a long program in Apple DOS?  Remember, your "long program"
was measured in sectors -- it took as long as a minute to load a decent-sized
binary file, and that was only 32K or so!  Once the actual data transfer begins
the Amiga actually blows most systems away in speed... and you can't be serious
about the Mac being fast... it usually takes longer to return to the 100K 
finder than to start a multi-megabyte Amiga program.

>     In fact, I think that loading icons individually from the disk itself was
>the greatest idea that CBM (or WHOEVER) could have ever come up with. And i'm
>soooo glad that the disk read/write routines are slower than sh** on top of
>that! 
No, they are fast.  It's just that the way the disks are laid out, it is
necessary to read a major portion of the entire disk to find your file.  From
then on, it's quite quick.  And what about the fastfilesystem?  I remember
a posting of ffsfloppy that allowed one to use the FFS on a floppy, but have
no idea of how fast it was...  Anyone out there tried it?  Anyway, on hard
drives, FFS really screams...


>and annoying (with it's all-too-familiar 'GRONK'
I *LIKE* the gronk -- it lets you know what the drive is doing!  You know if
your multitasking programs are thrashing with the drive, etc.

>'clicking' noise when its' empty
Get NoKlickStart, or a 3rd party drive.  Either eliminates the click.

>    And guess what? Everyone who buys an Amiga also buys a new friend. His
>name is GURU, and he seemingly has but one purpose in his RAM-dependent (or
>ROM-dependent depending on which model) life, and that's to MEDIDATE! Why, Oh
>Commodore, does my friend come to visit me when I run out of memory' or insert
>a corrupt disk in the drive? Any other machine would have simply informed meof
>the problem and i could have resolved it and continued with what I was doing
>before.
A reasonable objection -- it's not as robust as it should be, but that is
quite often due to BAD SOFTWARE.  Macs lock up too, with a cute little system
bomb, but at least sometimes the guru lets you rescue other applications when
one dies (TASK HELD...)  And anyway, why don't you just go buy GOMF, which will
intercept the GURU errors.  C= really should have bought that and put it in 1.3

> (as someone from comp.sys.apple put it...) "Dos 3.2 and
>integer basic"????
Yeah, right.

Now before everyone flames this guy (and he probably deserves it), consider
a few things.
	(1) there's no point
	(2) Some of his objections were valid ones, and should be considered
		and solved by C= and anyone else who cares...
	(3) Comp.sys.amiga has too much volume already!


						-- Jim Reich
						   cthulhu@athena.mit.edu