michael@rlgvax.UUCP (Michael Connick) (08/10/83)
First off, let me state that I own a Victor 9000, not a PC. However due to the similarity of the two machines hardware and software I have become an avid reader of this newsgroup and the various PC mags. I have been following with great interest the various discussions and flames associated with PC-DOS 2.0. My impression is that IBM has really done a disasterously bad job on this operating system and I can't understand why! The consensus of opinion seems to be that IBM was forced to quickly release 2.0 because "the XT's hard disk wasn't supported by 1.0". How can that be true??? I have had a Victor 9000 with a 10 meg hard disk for many months operating with MS-DOS 1.25a. This is a version of 1.0 designed to support a hard disk environment. The additional features added to the standard 1.0 version consist of a series of utilities allowing formating and partitioning of the hard disk into 1-n MS-DOS volumes and a configuration utility with a series of default partitioning schemes. The hard disk can be configured as the boot device. I can see no reason why this version of MS-DOS couldn't have been used on the XT. This week I received an alpha copy of MS-DOS 2.0 for the Victor. Having read all the articles on PC-DOS 2.0 I was prepared to start getting used to using "\" in path definitions. Wrong!!! MS-DOS 2.0 as it comes from Microsoft uses the normal "/" character in path definitions. Why did IBM use the backslash in their implementation? The Victor documentation also indicates that all bugs that were identified in PC-DOS 2.0, except for some problems with SORT, have been corrected. (This is internal Victor documentation which I received as a result of my consulting relationship with Victor.) This documentation also stated that the stability of 2.0 is now good enough for release of the operating system to Victor in-house users and selected software developers. If Victor is only now allowing restricted distribution of the operating system, how could IBM have previously released it to their unsuspecting customers? Why not start with MS-DOS 1.25a for the initial release on the XT? Since I just recevied MS-DOS 2.0 two days ago, I have not had time to gain much experience with it. A quick reading of the manual suggests to me that there may be some other differences between MS-DOS 2.0 and PC-DOS 2.0 other the "\" and "/" usage. If there is any interest on the net, I will post these differences as I discover them. I haven't even had a chance to review the "Programmer's Reference Manual" (delivered, interestingly enough, on a floppy). In conclusion, I am baffled by IBM's release of PC-DOS 2.0 and am interested in hearing any comments from netland on my posting.
jph@whuxlb.UUCP (08/15/83)
#R:rlgvax:-98300:whuxlb:6400009:000:740 whuxlb!jph Aug 14 21:00:00 1983 I have been following all the discussions about DOS 2.0 on net news and keep wondering if I am using the same awful piece of software. I have been using DOS 2.0 (from IBM) for the last 5 months and have not had any problems with it. I have used several software packages (VisiCalc, KnowledgeMan, Async Comm Support,...) and they all work just as well (if not better) than with DOS 1.1. I have written several assembly language routines to allow C system calls (read, write, lseek, open, close) to be done from PASCAL so I can make use of the tree structured directories and they work just fine. Now I am sure you can find problems with it (and I have), but what is the big deal? A Satisfied DOS 2.0 User Jim Holtman ...!harpo!whuxlb!jph