hard-sector 5 1/4 disk

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Tue Nov 13 15:18:04 2001

You're right on the money, there, Eric, and I'm with you all the way on the
rather meager sort of DOS. By comparison with CP/M, it was pretty
disappointing, and Peter Boyle, the author of the XPL0 language for the 6502,
spent only a few weeks (less than two months) of his spare time, all the while
earning a living doing something for which he got paid, writing the APEX OS,
which was much easier to use, in my rather limited experience with the Apple,
than the various versions of an OS offered for the Apple][/][+, etc. and was
designed from the ground up for doing useful work, and not necessarily for
playing games. He did his work on 8" drives, I'd add, since he, too, had
limited confidence in the Apple][ disk subsystem.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric J. Korpela" <korpela_at_ssl.berkeley.edu>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 10:23 AM
Subject: Re: hard-sector 5 1/4 disk


>
> > If Sellam insists, then we can agree to disagree, since I don't think much
of
> > the Apple][, not back in the early days of microcomputers, and certainly not
> > now, when we can all thank our lucky starts that we have better tools to
use.
>
> On the other hand, I love Apple ][s. I spent much of my younger days with
> them. I have a fairly reasonable collection of ][ series and clones. I spend
> more time with my ][s than with any other of my systems. I love 'em. Yet,
> I'm not joining Sellam in insisting that the Disk ][ system was the best thing
> on the market.
>
> Then again, I don't join my fellow Apple ][ collectors in claiming that the
> 6502 was the best processor on the market either. Like all religions, the
> true believers will always shout down the heretics.
>
> What the Apple ][ was (including the Disk ][ system) is an example of what
> a great hacker can do with limited resources. It wasn't the fastest machine.
> It didn't have the best graphics. It didn't have the best disk subsystem.
> It had a positively crappy DOS. But it was an incredible hack. Maybe the
> best I've ever seen.
>
> Eric
>
>
Received on Tue Nov 13 2001 - 15:18:04 GMT