OT: redhat

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>On Sun, Nov 14 00:19 , Men gasped, women fainted, and small children 
>were reduced to tears as Bill Campbell confessed to all:" 
>
>> On Sun, Nov 14, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>> >On Sat, Nov 13 15:01 , Bill Campbell, showing utter disregard for 
>
>> ...
>
>> >Remember the FAT12.  And remember when you could only have
>> >about 512 files total.  [I think it was 512 - it may have been
>> >slightly different].  THen came 16 bit fat and of course the 2GB
>> >limits were there.  So you made three 2GB partitions, and then
>> >took whatever was left and made as many logical partitions to use
>> >up the drive space.
>
>> Microsoft's first ``solution'' to large file systems was to
>> crank up the segment size which increased the total size
>> without increasing the number of segments. One effect was
>> to waste large amounts of disk space because of inefficient
>> storage.
>
>And their first solution to the 512 ?? file limit was to create
>PC-DOS 2.0 [this was before they came with the MS-DOS line with
>their own impramatur.]  When I first read about that it looked like
>they had answered all the problems I had with DOS 1.x.  You could
>almost call that the first solution to large file systems and it
>was sorely needed.  Mountain had come out with a $2500 add-on
>box that let you add a 5MB HD to the system - and without the 2.0
>and the directory hierarchy those would have been useless.  Since
>they were reworking the structure they had an opportunity to do it
>right but almost got the feeling the MS people didn't understand
>the base OS they had bought and modified.

I think there were many organizations outside of Microsoft who understood
(understand) their systems better than M$ does.  Quarterdeck comes to mind
in that it had much better memory management for DOS/Windows than anything
that came out of Redmond.  The folks at Locus, authors of PC Interface and
Merge, are another.

>After running it for about 6 months I gave up.  I found that my old
>8-bit systems were faster on anything that had screen output
>because of what I considered the stupid way they hanlded screen
>output.  Everthing I had used up until them used memory-mapped
>video.  The only way the PCs would approach the same speed
>was to turn off any output to the display.   

When I first tried an IBM PC I was appalled at (a) their lousy keybord, and
(b) their video which had horrible latency.  When people would come into my
Radio Shack ``X'' deparment at 19th and K streets in Washington, D.C.
looking for word processing, I would show them Scripsit on the Model II
with its memory mapped video and keyboard that was very close to the IBM
Selectric, then send them around the corner to the IBM product center to
try the PC.  Their secretaries would usually be totally revolted by the
IBMs and come back to buy the Model IIs.

...

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
		-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"