Apple III & Profile

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Wed Aug 12 15:26:36 1998

At 11:56 AM 8/12/98 -0700, Sam Ismail wrote:
>
>I'll just say this: Apple UCSD Pascal blows.
>
>As you mentioned, if you put the wrong disk in, it does not give you a way
>to recover. I know its hard to believe any software could be worse than
>Windows at error recovery, but Apple Pascal was. I once lost my entire
>disk of Pascal programs because the OS could not find the right disk. The
>error message was something like "Volume not found: directory erased".

UCSD Pascal's directory structure is absolutely elementary.
It's FAT has room for a fixed number of files, and each is stored
contiguously in logical blocks. If you've still got the disk,
you can easily recover your files. I'm not sure why it
would decide to zap the directory structure - are you sure it
wasn't your fault? :-) There's a volume label, and I thought
the OS at least checked this before it assumed the right disk
was in the drive - unless your program was working at a low
level, and asked for a specific (#4:, #5:) drive.

- John
Received on Wed Aug 12 1998 - 15:26:36 BST