From: John.Carver@launchpad.unc.edu (John Carver)
Subject: Re: a MB style flame against IBMs
Organization: University of North Carolina Extended Bulletin Board Service
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 16:50:31 GMT

>>: >Jeff, you didn't take that post seriously, did you?  It was just some
>>:
>>:   No, Jerry. It was a 'real life, everyday experience' that the guy had using

>Well I've heard this story many times from many different people, so I
>doubt that he's making it up. Although I avoid pc's like the plague, I

I believe I can settle this.

It was a real life experience.  Well, partly I posted it to make fun of
MB, but mostly out of aggrivation.  (Actually, if I had wanted to really
imitate MB, I would have posted it to a bunch of comp.sys.ibm groups,
and I'd keep poking my nose in comp.sys.ibm.misc and demanding that
MS-DOS get the Commodities Exchange or IBM will surely fold).

Here's another I forgot to mention.  I always knew MS-DOS had
bran-dammaged filenames (8 chars + 3, all upper case).  I figured
Windows 3.1 must surely fix that by now.  Hah!  Guess again!  The
Windows 3.1 still has 8+3 upper case.  Maybe there is a way to switch on
real filenames in Windows, but my friend didn't know of it, if there was.

Well, I know that OS/2 fixes this little problem.  But there are still
*lots* of people using Windows 3.1 - hell, there are still the majority
of users still on MS-DOS.  You'd figure, that in 10 years of
development, a company with the resources of IBM could fix this for
MS-DOS!  I find 8+3 filenames simply intolerable - instead of a
filename of "F-18_Eschelon_flyby.Anim", you get stuff like
"F-18ESFB.ANI".  Well, OK, never mind the multi-billion dollar IBM for
a moment.  You'd figure Microsoft could fix it for Windows 3.1. 
Microsoft is, I believe, far bigger than CBM is.

And yet another.  My friend has a tape drive on his 486.  Guess what! 
**There is no device file for the tape drive accessable by the OS**!! 
That's right!  You have to run a special software package to access the
tape drive.  You can't get at it from *anywhere* else!  We wanted to do
the equivilant of "copy ser: tape:" on the clone.  No dice.  Think you
can use "tar" to acess the tape?  Sorry, since there is no device for
the tape, you can't.  We wanted to connect the Amiga to the IBM, do
something like "tar -cf SER: DH0:" on the Amiga to send an archive of
the Amiga's disk to the serial port, and save this to the IBM's tape. 
I said I can easily set up the Amiga half, with a single command line. 
He said there was no way to do "copy ser: tape:" on the IBM though, and
the dedicate tape access program certainly didn't let you do it.  So
here's a question for the Windows 3.1 guru's out there - HOW THE HECK
DO YOU DO "copy ser: tape:"????  We would really like to get this
working.  I tested it out on two Amigas (one sends the archive to the
serial port, the other copies the incoming serial data to the tape), and
it works like a charm, so I'm sure the concept is valid.  Hell, I bet I
could just as easily connect an Amiga and pretty much any Unix machine
through the serial cable and do that.  But the real need here is to go
to a Windows machine.

I just have trouble getting over how ungodly primitive these things
are.  I'm sure OS/2 is better, but man, you'd think they'd have fixed up
MS-DOS and Windows a little given 10 years.  CBM, a much smaller
company, has made large improvements in their operating system -
they've added DATA types, public screens, commodities, even an MS-DOS
filesystem shipped as part of AmigaDos, they're about to add
retargetble graphics, etc.  Yet IBM can't get long filenames or a
stinking device file for the tape drive!  I'd even go so far as to say
the tape drive under Windows is damn near useless.  You're stuck with
their one proprietary tape acess program for their own special card that
somehow interfaces with the floppy disk controller (!???).

So anyway its a true to life experience of an Amiga user who tried
Windows 3.1 and was severely underwhelmed.  I'll stop back in 3 or 4
more years to check in on Windows NT.  Maybe by then "DOS" machines
will have cought up to the Amiga.  My acid test will be the ability to
do the equivilant of "copy ser: tape:" on the NT box.  If we can do it,
then I will believe and maybe convert.  Else, no dice.  I do'nt want
to get into OS/2, since I think Windows NT will kill it.  NT isn't here
yet, and it'll be a while anyway before it is supported enough to be
useful.  We'll see.  Eventually clones are bound to take over the
world, I suppose, not from any staggering degree of competence, but
through mediocrity and large numbers.

  John

--
   The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of
     North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Campus Office for Information
        Technology, or the Experimental Bulletin Board Service.
           internet:  laUNChpad.unc.edu or 152.2.22.80