stepping machanism of Apple Disk ][ drive (was Re: Heatkit 51/4 floppies)

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Fri Apr 9 09:13:00 1999

No, I have no personal conflict with an Apple employee. The problem to
which I refer was all to common back in the '70's. Perhaps it was because
of the way in which the various program vendors wrote their software, but
I'd bet it's because they weren't left much choice. The detail to which I
refer is the absence of a message like the infamous IBM-PC's ". . . Abort,
Retry, Fail . . ." message. Once the Apple encountered a read error of some
type, it seemed that it couldn't recover without a restart. I don't know
the details, but I saw it every day that I was in the same room with an
Apple that was not idle. It seemed that the only way to avoid this type of
problem was to avoid the Apple, so, with one notable exception, that was
what I did. These things are based on perceptions, though, not necessarily
a sound and rigorous evaluation of the facts.

I once worked in a room with over a dozen MAC's though, and was the only one
with both a MAC and a PC/AT. We constantly had "trouble" with the MAC's
while I continued to chug along with my PC/AT running DOS. My work was
always ahead of schedule if I could stick to the PC. Now, when I ran the
MAC, e.g. using EXCEL, or McDRAW, which provided functions not so readily
available to the PC, I didn't have as much trouble as some of the more
common programs used by the others, e.g. WORD or MacWrite. I did my writing
in WordStar which I knew quite well, having used it since pre-release 0.7
(WordMaster). I imagine that quite a bit of the trouble was due to the
newness of the network scheme used to share the two laser printers. I'd
point out almost daily, that my PC/AT with a laser printer and a substantial
hard disk, plus a COLOR display, which none of the MAC's there had, cost
less than one of these MAC's alone.

The bias I held against Apple products was based on the perception that lots
of features and performance were sacrificed in favor of the rather lame
color display, which I then felt was useful for games and other forms of
entertainment, which I felt were out of place in the office.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Sellam Ismail <dastar_at_ncal.verio.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, April 09, 1999 3:19 AM
Subject: Re: stepping machanism of Apple Disk ][ drive (was Re: Heatkit 51/4
floppies)


>On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Richard Erlacher wrote:
>
>> My contempt for Apple begins and ends with their total disregard for the
>> value of your data. If you wrote to their floppies, especially if your
>> computer was in the "front room" of a business, exposed to whatever dust
was
>> carried in by customers and wind, etc, from the parking lot, (I had a
client
>> years ago, whose mail-order business was operated with the "help" of an
>> Apple-II with two controllers and three drives in just such a location.)
>> you'd frequently observe the computer locking up because it had come to a
>> bit it couldn't read. The reason was probably contamination of media or
>> drives, but the only recovery was the reset. Your data, meanwhile, and
>> perhaps your customer calling long distance, were gone by now. They
>> designed the MAC with no memory parity assuming that you'd not mind if
your
>> data was corrupted without your knowledge, and though the disk handling
was
>> a bit more mature than the Apple-II "I give up . . . and die" it wasn't
much
>> better.
>
>This sounds like poorly written software to me. The only time I've ever
>had my Apple ][ lock up because some data couldn't be read from the disk
>was because the software told the Apple to lock up. I think your bias is
>totally unfounded, or at least founded upon a predisposition to hating the
>Apple ][ for some odd reason. Did an Apple employee fart near you or spit
>on your car at some point in your life or something?
>
>Sellam Alternate e-mail:
dastar_at_siconic.com
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
>Don't rub the lamp if you don't want the genie to come out.
>
>                  Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0
>                   See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details!
>                        [Last web site update: 04/03/99]
>
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 09:13:00 BST

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