On 27 Oct 94 04:59:00 +0000, Johnathan Taylor said: > Subject: Re: Bob's amazing hard-drive plans...
Just a small point... could you tell your software to put this line in the header instead of in the body of your message? > Most other serious operating systems are disc based, even if the larger > memory > models use a substantial disc-buffer in ram to reduce drive accesses in a > multi-tasking enviroment! Most other serious operating systems assume that you have a large rapid- access disk drive and a CPU which has MMU and basic multitasking facilities (note: MSDOS does not qualify as a "serious" operating system). > AFAIK gzip is useless without tar to make sam-dos filetypes a generic serial > file! Not at all. Most things that get compressed are code files and they don't come with any particular information that you need in order to run them (they have a start address, but it isn't strictly necessary. Some existing compressors such as powercrunch (which isn't that powerful at all) make you specify the starting address for obvious reasons. In any case, the gzip header might well be able to contain the filetype information. > LHARC could be used to do that much simpler and in less space and in one > process! I don't know what LHARC is. Why is there such a large variety of file formats around (lbr, arc/ark, lha, hqx, zip, zoo, lzh, several forms of lzw, tar, ...)? It seems that every time someone wants to archive something they invent a new format for it instead of using one of the commonly available ones. Anyway, the compression rate of ".tar.gz" is hard to beat, so if you want to make everyone use lharc you'd better be sure of what you are doing... > Obviously the multi-task facility would be functional but NOT for general > use. > It'd normally only get used if say a remote user was logged in and the > operator (me) needed to do somthing important! A remote user logged in to a Sam? Get real! > otherwise it'd be only running > a single task but using the unix parent/child processing to seriously > simplify > the linking of programs actions to make a powerful if not blindingly fast > system:-) You can't make a useable Unix process hierarchy on a Sam. It hasn't got basic memory allocation facilities. Sure, if all your programs are below 32K then you can page them in and out without too much trouble. But how are you going to run programs which are over 32K? There's no way you can prevent one process from reading or scribbling over another process's memory and/or screwing up the entire system. Sorry, but if I want a useable Unix system I'll buy a 486 or a 68040... imc
