On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> It's not pilot error that causes the Apple disk subsystem to fall
> apart whenever there's the slightest error, it's the "we've got your
> money now, so we've got you by the short and curly" attitude that
> Apple has always had with respet to their customers' data. That
> design of WOZ's was clever and cheap, ... REALLY cheap ... , but not
> terribly reliable. Back in the early '80's I didn't know a single
> user of the genuine Apple disk subsystem that didn't have a data loss
> per hour in steady use. The guy I mentioned initially had phone-order
You must have had some very unlucky friends. If everyone had this same
experience then there probably would not have been millions of Apple disk
systems sold.
> business, and, because his environment was not perfectly clean, he was
> constantly having to reboot his Apple, since it couldn't recover from
> a disk read error, and this was before he had a toll-free number.
Sounds like shitty software to me.
> I remember how people whined about the PC's <abort, retry, fail> error
> message for disk errors, yet Apple didn't even have one. It just went
> TILT.
No it didn't.
> Even back in those days we'd all come to expect better than that, and,
> by the way, the whole problem was exxentially gone if one used 8"
> FDD's with the SVA controller.
How did that fix bad software with poorly designed error recovery?
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger
http://www.vintage.org
Received on Wed Oct 31 2001 - 10:34:11 GMT