kbad@atari.UUCP (Ken Badertscher) (03/08/89)
(heh, I figured that title would get your attention... ;-)
When somebody showed me what ST Report had to say about TOS 1.4 in the
latest issue, I just about fell out of my chair. Something about a
"fatal hard disk error" that was corrected by Leonard Tramiel and myself.
For those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Ken Badertscher,
and I'm a TOS software engineer at Atari. In fact, for the past six or
eight months, I've been the guy who puts all the various parts of TOS
together and burns the result into EPROMS for us to test here at Atari.
I've also worked on many of the later enhancements that went into TOS
1.4, in the BIOS, Desktop and AES, primarily.
The last thing that was holding up approval for TOS 1.4's release to
manufacturing a couple of weeks ago was a bug that bit Leonard Tramiel
(VP of Software at Atari). Leonard had been running his system for
quite some time with a hard disk that was literally on its last legs --
it had several* hardware problems, as well as media problems, but he had
a lot of old stuff on it and never bothered to move it off to a
different disk. It's too bad that he didn't, because a VERY OBSCURE bug
in TOS reared its ugly head, and sent his hard disk data into oblivion.
Now before everyone starts to panic and think that TOS is going to
thrash their hard disk, I want to make something very clear:
THE BUG IN QUESTION IS *VERY* RARE AND ONLY SHOWS UP IN
EXTREMELY RARE CIRCUMSTANCES!
Now that I've made that perfectly clear, on with the story. Allan
Pratt looked into the guts of GEMDOS, the part of TOS that handles
files, and after a lot of looking, reconstructed the weird circumstances
that caused Leonard to lose his hard disk data. Allan fixed the bug.
In fact, this whole episode started back in December, and Allan fixed
the bug in December. Leonard wasn't convinced that it had been tested
thoroughly, however, so he was reluctant to proceed with releasing TOS
until it had been tested thoroughly.
So, after weeks of writing test code, and trying to reconstruct the
problem that happened to Leonard, and performing extensive autopsies on
his hard disk, and running test programs for days at a time, I finally
concluded that the bug was fixed. Not only that, but I cleared up
another minor inconsistency in the way GEMDOS deals with deleting files.
(Actually, I just discovered it; Allan finally upgraded the code).
In conclusion, I'd like you to all remember two very important points.
NUMBER 1: The bug that bit Leonard has been around in GEMDOS since DAY
ONE. If this were really a "FATAL ERROR" that could regularly cause
problems, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FOUND AND CORRECTED A LONG TIME AGO, AND A
LOT MORE PEOPLE WOULD HAVE REPORTED THE PROBLEM. In point of fact, it
was a very unusual bug, and to his immense credit, Leonard is such a
perfectionist that he would not allow TOS 1.4 to be released even with
such a obscure, rare bug in it! NUMBER 2: ST Report reported that this
bug was fixed in the FEBRUARY 24 version of TOS 1.4. In point of fact,
the FEBRUARY 24 version of TOS does not exist. As you recall, I am
currently the person at Atari who builds these things, and I never built
a FEBRUARY 24 version. You can rest assured, however, that the FINAL
RELEASE of TOS 1.4 will be as bug-free as we could possibly make it.
The moral of the story is:
Don't believe everything you read in the press!
--
Ken Badertscher | Hey, umm, the stuff I said up there
Atari R&D Software Engine | is, like, what _I_ think, okay?
{portal,ames,imagen}!atari!kbad | So, y'know, don't bug Atari about it.