Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/04/11:43:29
On Sun, 2 Feb 1997 jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com wrote:
> Why drive letters in the first place?
> Drive numbers would allow for more flexibility than drive letters.
Programs expect drive letters. Making drive numbers would work
for new programs but would require a hack to work with older
software. (Kinda like LFN's) If we're going to break older
software, we might as well implement something that isn't a hack.
This means adding commands like "MOUNT" and "UMOUNT" to dos. For
example
C:\>MD PARTN2
C:\>MOUNT C:\PARTN2 HDA3: /TYPE=EXT2
Now that disk is a part of the C: drive. It works just like the
old DOS JOIN command, well not exactly, but very similarly.
It also does away with the drive letter idea and makes things
much simpler. Using drive numbers would be worse than switching
from DOS to VMS!!!!
I'd much rather type:
C:\>CD PARTN2
than
C:\>SET DEFAULT DISK$USER2:[MIKE.HARRIS]
(equivalent VMS command)
OH, by the way, if anyone wants to have a trip down memory lane,
I've got a program called DCL for DOS that is a port of the VMS
DCL command interpreter!! It is freeware and is good for a
laugh. You actually *HAVE* to type SET DEFAULT and all those
lovely 10-mile long vms commands. SHOW DIRECTORY was it? or
just DIRECTORY? I can't remember. If anyone wants it, just drop
me a line and I'll mail it out. It's pretty small (100k or so).
> As another example, with linux if you have the right
> speech synthesizer and emacs running on your system you can
> also run emacspeak which gives a voice to linux.
If you have Linux, you can run all of those direct write DOS
programs under DOSemu and use Linux speech software to do the
dirty work, or you can telnet to yourself and run DOSemu so that
the screen is sent serially. Works for me.
Oh, by the way, you just quoted about 2 pages of text with your
reply and didn't refer to any of it. I've noticed that you quote
a lot in this fashion and it does waste a lot of bandwidth. I'm
not saying it to be rude or anything, just wanted to bring it to
your attention in case you didn't realize. Does your mailer have
an option for partial quoting?
Take care Jude.
Mike A. Harris | http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris
Computer Consultant | My webpage has moved and my address has changed.
My dynamic address: http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris/ip-address.html
mailto:mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca
4DOS can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.std.com/vendors/jpsoft
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