markv@uoregon.UUCP (Mark VandeWettering) (03/16/87)
In article <102@osupyr.UUCP> akw@osupyr.UUCP (FarOff MicroDesigns) writes: > Get DOS 2.5. You do *NOT* (I repeat _not_) want version 3.0. Even >though the old Atari had good intentions when it wrote this poor program, >it is now quite a huge pain-in-the-booty. It is _not_ compatible with the >older versions of DOS and not compatible with other third-party DOSs as >well. Granted. It is certainly not compatible with DOS2.5, 2.0 or pretty damn near anything else. > A good reason to avoid 3.0 is this: all other versions of DOS >written by Atari format the disk in 128 byte sectors. 3.0 uses a >1024 byte sector routine. So, if you were to, say, write a file that is >1025 bytes long, 3.0 will force the use of two sectors, resulting in the >loss of 1023 bytes on your disk (which would be trivial on other systems but >since 3.0 can only put ~90,000 bytes on a disk, this eats room FAST. Atari 2.0 does the same thing, except with a finer granularity. DOS 3.0 kills you if you have lots of teensy files, but really doesn't hurt much otherwise. If you combine that with the append bug that I mentioned in an earlier article, it really gets bad. I have wasted far more space with the append bug than any other problem. By all means, use spartados if you have a doubler. Use MYDOS or 2.5 if you need 2.0 compatibility. I still use 3.0 for most of my programming, and have suffered no ill effects. It really isn't all that bad. Long life to the 8-bit users! -- | Mark VandeWettering | | member of UO-EXODOS - distributed operating system research group | | University of Oregon Computer and Information Sciences Department | | markv@uoregon.edu OR markv@uoregon.uucp |