[Coco] [OT] Commodore 64 slow floppy

[Al Hartman]

Well... Here's a blog entry from one of the programmers:

"CP/M (in any of its variants) didn’t really do a whole lot. There was a 
simple flat file system. There was some character-at-a-time console output 
(useless on a computer with a graphical interface). And CP/M could load and 
programs. That was about it. (By modern standards it was missing: A 
heirarchical file system with directories, networking, memory management, 
processes and process scheduling, a notion of time, synchronization and 
locking primitives, a driver architecture, graphics, fonts, character sets . 
. . you get the idea).

GEM was was bolted on top of this primitive base. Since the underlying OS 
didn’t support more than one task, GEM had a lot of its own stuff to enable 
things like “desk accessories” that could run concurrently with (say) a word 
processor. It was pretty clunky.

None of us liked CP/M-68K. So when we heard that someone at DRI had been 
doing something much better, even though it was still unfinished, we 
unofficially jumped at it. GEMDOS started as a skunkworks project by a DRI 
engineer who had a reputation for being a loose canon. GEMDOS had a 
heirarchical file system that was compatible with MSDOS; it had a few other 
improvements, but this was the biggie. But in December 1984 GEMDOS was still 
being written.

The STs that went to the CES show were running CP/M-68K. In late January, 
after a bunch of hand-wringing, Leonard Tramiel made the decision to go with 
GEMDOS. We’d had it substantially working for several weeks, and it looked 
like it was going to be fine. Notably we did not have any hard disks to try 
it out on, so all of our testing was done on floppy disk based systems — 
this would come back to hit us hard later."

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000

-----Original Message----- 
From: Gene Heskett

On Wednesday 22 January 2014 16:12:46 Al Hartman did opine:

> Just not true. The OS on the Atari ST line was licensed from Digital
> Research. Both the command line and the GUI portions.

And where do I find such verification on my ST-E the next time I drag it
out & putz around getting the ST-225 HD started before the OS times out and
gives up?  That is usually 20+ resets & some light hammering on the drive
case to break the stiction loose.

> It was cheaper to license the OS than to write it from scratch, and
> faster. As an Atari-ST owner, I never found that the OS kept me from
> doing anything I wanted to do.
>
> -[ Al ]-