from Clarence Verge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>I have no need for 32Bit FATs either. OR gigabyte drives.
DOS has already evolved too far for me. I find the bells and whistles
designed to keep the great unwashed from hurting themselves exceedingly
annoying. Perhaps if we had let them run with sharp sticks for a while
we would have a lot more computer literate people on the planet. The
current crop isn't even Windoze literate for the most part - but they
do know how to find and play the games and music they want.
>
Do you really want to go back to DOS 3.x, where a partition's maximum size was
32 MB? No CD-ROM (?); no Zip drive because it's too big for the OS? When I
bought my original PC, I got MS-DOS 4.01, which I had to install myself, which
took four times before I got the printer to print. Hard drive was 40 MB in one
partition, not recognizable to DOS 3.x. That was summer 1990, and DOS 3.x was
already antiquated.
Now the trouble with FAT16 is inefficient use of disk space on large partitions.
>From 256 to 512 MB partition size, inode (cluster) size is 8192 bytes. All the
information from the Internet requires disk space, though not as much as if you
keep music files. Don't forget all those files Arachne keeps in the cache!
They consume disk space!
>p.s. The 640k problem is hardware. Operating systems get around it by
various means. What would be nice is new HARDWARE.
Totally DIFFERENT hardware. No intel architecture.
But it would be economically impractical to make new hardware that didn't
run the existing crappy software. :(
>
Such new, totally different hardware already exists! Alpha (compaq, formerly
DEC) and Ultra Sparc. Ultra Sparc runs Solaris, NetBSD, Linux (anything else?).
Alpha runs Windows NT 4 (but no more updates), OpenVMS, Tru64 (Unix), FreeBSD,
NetBSD and Linux. Ultra Sparc and Alpha are 64-bit RISC chips. Now will
Intel's Itanium and AMD's Sledgehammer still have the 640k problem? PowerPC is
another RISC chip with no 640k problem.
