Responding to the original message below:
In 1982 when I got my first Apple // plus, PC meant Personal Computer; not
a trademark or brand.
Later, when I started to learn about the "IBM world",DOS meant to me Disk
Operating System; not a trademark or brand.
All computing devices who used disks, diskettes, hard disks, or disk packs
required a Disk Operating System. The DOS I was familiar with was Apple
DOS 3.3; and later, Apple ProDOS. Who were these people telling me that
they were using a DOS computer and I was using an Apple?
I very much resented these so-called DOS computers taking over my computing
world.
When I first learned to program, it was Apple BASIC which resided in ROM on
the Apple. You could read an entire file sequencially by delimitations in
to arrays, perform operations on various data as stored in the arrays then
sequencially write the file back out to the disk; or you could read a
record from a Random Access File, perform operations upon it and write it
back into place on the disk. As I understood it, file structure was much
more rigid in random access files while size of sequencial files was
limited by memory space.
I have now lost my way. I have no idea how it is all done under other
operating systems, but I ASSume that they still require Disk Operating
Systems.
At 09:13 AM 5/30/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I first encountered DOS in 1984 when I used Wordperfect to edit COBOL
>programs at college. Prior to that, I had already been working on
>minicomputers (what some might mistakenly call mainframes) for a few
>years (and still do). I then owned a Sinclair ZX81, then a Color
>Computer 2, before I got my first IBM PC compatible in 1989. When
>trying to learn how to use desktop computers, I remember thinking that
>the 'desktop computer paradigm' might be easier to learn for those who
>had *not* already been using mainframes or minicomputers. I think it
>had something to do with the fact that mainframes are a
>'transaction-based' environment. In other words, most mainframe
>programs read, write, or change discrete records in a file. On desktop
>computers, however, I thought it was strange to start Lotus, or a word
>processor, and then load a whole file to change discrete records, and
>then remember to 'Save' the file when I was finished with it. That,
>at first, seemed awkward to me. That's why it occured to me that
>desktop computers might have been easier for me to learn if I had not
>already had experience with mainframes and minicomputers.
>
>BTW, when I got active on Compuserve, and BBS's, in 1989, or so, I got
>frustrated when communicating with people who would talk about 'PC's,
>when what they really meant was 'desktop computers'. There *was* a
>difference in my mind. "PC" was really, I thought for a while, a
>trademark, or at least a designation that should only be used for the
>IBM version of the desktop computer. All the other desktop computers,
>like Atari, Coco, Commodore, TRS-80, Mac, etc. should only be referred
>to as 'desktop computers', *not* as PC's.
>
>Now, of course, the term 'PC' is used as a generic term for desktop
>computers, but I still prefer my way of thinking.
>
>I just remembered something. I used an IBM (pre-MS-DOS PC) desktop
>computer briefly in 1979 or so. I believe it was called the 'Desktop
>64', or something. It only had a couple floppy drives, no hard drive.
>
>When I wrote my first PC-compatible shareware program, in 1990, it
>uses a 'mainframe' paradigm. I.E., when the user enters, changes or
>deletes records, it just operates on one record at a time. In other
>words, they don't load a whole file first, then save it when
>finished. In reality, since most desktop computers (and mainframes,
> I presume) use buffers, the program really changes records in the
>buffer, and then the OS reads or writes them to/from the HD in groups,
>transparently to my program. I remember my first users being confused
>that the program didn't ask them to 'Save' the file when they exited
>the program. Because of the presence of the buffers, the 'Loading',
>'Changing', then 'Saving' a whole file still seems redundant to me,
>since, in many cases, the whole file then probably exists in 2 places
>in the PC's memory.
>
>-- [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] USA
>
<H T >
<Howard Traxler>
<Technology Specialist>
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A.>
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