🚀 go-pugleaf

rwa@auvax.UUCP (Ross Alexander) writes:
>Jim's article <2697@dadla.TEK.COM> is absolutely correct.  Why *is* there
>no CHKDSK.TTP or whatever?  Lord knows there are enough known bugs in the
.......
and a lot more things which we probably all agree are correct..
.......
>Even with all this planning, the XT's still beat my ST.  Are you listening,
>Neil?  Your people are crying out for help ;-).
As people that have been following the net for the last two years have
noticed, the only positive action that Atari has ever taken about GEMDOS
bugs was the famous 'We're working on it!' from Neil Harris, concerning
the 40-folder problem nearly exactly two years ago. Since then Atari has
fixed problems in the BIOS and XBIOS and even some bugs in GEM, but
none of the minor or major GEMDOS bugs have been fixed. Why?
Well there were two possible ways Atari could have improved GEMDOS
since they started noticing the bugs (which as far as I know, happened
when they started shipping hard disks to developers (late 85)):

      1) fix the bugs inhouse, which would have been pretty easy
         for most of them (in fact for most problems they wouldn't have to
         have done it themselves: more than one person in Germany
         have actually rebuilt the C-Source of GEMDOS by diassembling
         the ROM's (one of them has actually published a book with
         the listing) and have repeatedly pointed out how to fix
         the bugs to Atari (most seem to be results of typos)). Only
         solving the '40-folder' problem would have needed some rewriting
         of the OS since this is a design problem of the internal
         memory management of GEMDOS.

      2) Get the fixed GEMDOS from DRI, that a fixed version of GEMDOS
         exists inside DRI has been  rumoured since the beginning of last
         year, one report even quoted somebody from DRI saying that they
         had given it to Atari............

So what's Atari's motivation not do to anything about GEMDOS (except
spreading rumours that they are working on a completely new OS (and even
if they are it must have very low priority (just one person working on it)))?
Well it costs money and if you have such a good scrapegoat as DRI,
why bother? Plus, all the GEMDOS problems have not hurt sales in Europe
(specially in the German speaking part), this is partially due to Atari
suppressing the information (the 40 folder bug was left out of the
German SH204 manual and only became widespread knowledge around Summer 87),
partially to the computer press not being critical enough about what
Atari Germany told them (remember the sentence 'The development of GEMDOS
is finished!' by Mr. Stumpf).

Now the only reason I bothered to write this is the astounding insolence,
that the same company that doesn't even bothers to support the OS on it's
major line of computers, is actually intending to be selling 4 (FOUR!)
different lines of computers, plus 4 different operating systems, plus
4 different window/graphic packages in 1988! Atari must really think
that we are stupid!


                               Simon Poole
                               Bitnet: K538915@CZHRZU1A
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