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- Newsgroups: comp.arch
- Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!ames!pacbell.com!UB.com!quack!dfox
- From: dfox@quack.sac.ca.us (David Fox)
- Subject: Re: <None> (Should be Open Systems, bloody NEWS system...)
- Message-ID: <fWTeSfY@quack.sac.ca.us>
- Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
- References: <BzGL07.2wK@dscomsa.desy.de> <fWPrzAU@quack.sac.ca.us> <BzIx0C.C6G@dscomsa.desy.de>
- Date: 21 Dec 1992 01:41:34 UTC
- Lines: 104
-
- In article <BzIx0C.C6G@dscomsa.desy.de> Hallam@zeus02.desy.de writes:
- >In article <fWPrzAU@quack.sac.ca.us>, dfox@quack.sac.ca.us (David Fox) writes:
- >
- >|>>|>> So far, the most "open" system I can think of is a 386 running DOS:
- >|>>|>> - systems available from all sorts of people
- >|>>|>> - CPU's available from (at least) AMD, Intel, IBM, and Cyrix
- >|>
- >|>shell out to the various software writers to try those compilers out.
- >|>With Unix, one can get gcc for free, including source.
- >
- >In the old days you used to get C free with the O/S. In fact it was the biggest
- >selling point about ten years ago when a compiler was something few people could
- >afford.
-
- Yes that's apparently true, but I wasn't around in the 'old days'. Many
- Unixes include a compiler as part of the OS, but it's not exactly free, as
- the price for the OS is jacked up accordingly.
-
- >Yep now there is a closed system. Or rather it was intended to be. IBM did not
- >expect nor intend the clone market to exist. It is noticable that their
-
- No, but they did allow some openness. The architecture was designed (or
- was it accidental? :) ) to allow or make easier the existence of clones,
- much in contrast to the macintosh. Of course I consider this a good thing;
- one interesting product of all this is that when you want a Mac peripheral
- (like a hard drive) it costs easily three times as much as an equivalent
- peripheral for IBM architecture-based machines.
-
- >graphics (in a sensible place) and high capacity disks. IBM confined it's
- >inovation to the keyboard layout.
-
- Is that innovation? The F-keys belong on the left where God intended
- them to be! :)
-
- >WARNING: terminal cannot home cursor
- >WARNING: terminal cannot move cursor to lower left of screen
- >WARNING: terminal cannot scroll backwards
- >- (press RETURN)
- >
- >Name
- > dd - copy and convert data
- >
- >
- >Note the warnings caused by sysop hackery since my last login. Let us hope that
- >MSdos never has a dd command. A CONVERT command perhaps.
-
- Notwithstanding the warnings, which have to do properly with your man(1)
- not dd, dd isn't just a conversion tool, although it can be used nicely
- for that.
-
- Until recently I didn't know what a dd was. I was using DOS, and doing a
- lot of file transferring over many years on DOS-based Bulletin Board
- Systems. We went through various file-transfer protocols and settled on
- Zmodem with file recovery. Before then, if the transfer was interrupted,
- you had no choice but to resume the download in its entirety.
-
- More recently, I was on a unix system getting a file with a version of
- sz that didn't have file recovery (no -r switch). The transfer was
- interrupted, and I was dreadful, about to face a long session of re-
- downloading the file (which was about one megabyte). In desperation,
- I contacted the system administrator, who informed me on how to use
- dd, including the skip= parameter. I tried it - calculated the
- number of blocks to skip (not difficult) and wrote the remainder to
- another file, and downloaded that, reconstructing the file on my
- end. Needless to say, I was pretty impressed. I thought to myself,
- "What have I been missing all these years with MS-DOS?"
-
- dd is also extremely useful when splitting a large file across floppies,
- something that MS-DOS doesn't do by itself, although many authors have
- developed proprietary methods to do this and other (unrelated) things.
-
- That's essentially what I use dd for - I rarely need the conversion
- facilities, actually.
-
- >Let us also hope that a future CONVERT command would consider *THESE*
- >conversions an irrelevance!
-
- What would it do, look at the incoming byte stream and become convinced
- that it is ascii or ebcdic? How?
-
- Most MS-DOS users don't get data on 9-track tapes in EBCDIC anyway. Heck,
- they can't even use their tape drive for things other than what the manu-
- facturer's proprietary program allows them to use it for.
-
-
- >A little though could elimintate the need for this command entirely. The
- >apparent purpose of the command is to match device capabilities. This would
- >argue for attributes to be applied to the device:-
-
- dd has many uses - you're emphasizing some and I'm ephasizing others, of
- course. The format-matching capabilities wouldn't get used much by MS-DOS
- users, sure. But it could have other uses. For instance, dd is how I
- copy disks in Unix all the time. With MS-DOS, I have to use diskcopy, and
- that program isn't intelligent enough to do the copy in a single pass! (DR-
- DOS's version can, of course, and that's one reason I started to use DR.)
- With dd, I can simply send an image of a 1.2 meg floppy to a 1.44 meg floppy
- - MS-DOS has never been able to do that.
-
- >thinking in which simple and straightforward tasks are reduced to mystic
- >cabalistic rites whose mysteries are to be known but to the few.
-
- Maybe but what is the alternative? Macintosh? Where you have to use
- a mouse to drag a file to a trashcan because 'rm' or 'del' is too
- arcane a command for people to use?
-