On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Michael Watterson <mike@radioway.org>wrote:

>  "86-DOS had a command structure and application programming interface
> that imitated that of Digital Research's (abbreviated DR or DRI) CP/M
> operating system, which made it easy to port programs from the latter.
> The system was purchased by Microsoft and developed further as PC-DOS
> and MS-DOS."
>

Actually I was always wondering about the entire story, as I still have a
Microsoft CP/M card based on Z80. You insert that into an Apple ][ and then
you could run Turbo Pascal and dBase on it. It was pretty advanced by that
time. Was the CP/M with that card a DR one? Have to check it out.


> When MS, MM, SD cards and CF was smaller (I have 4M to 32M cards) a
> better file system was a problem due to overhead. Ext3 didn't exist and
> NTFS had nearly 20Mbyte overhead.
>

Now we have 32 and 64GByte of flash disks...


> Agreed, but:
> You have to supply the filesystem for Windows too, if using some
> alternate for your Camera. My XP has ext 2 support  seamlessly working,
> but  ext2 is  IMO poorer than 1994 NTFS and  HPFS (OS/2).  Calculation I
> don't think is the issue. I think availability of  source code, and low
> RAM/ROM footprint was more likely issues.
>

I guess Sony, Fuji, Cannon and other vendors could easily setup
a committee to work out a file system that fits well on flash disks and
provides recovery against most common issues. Then writing a filesystem
driver is not a big deal -- they already put an install CD next to each cam,
so why not put that driver on it as well?

Or they can choose etx4 for example which then already have a driver for
Linux and Windows as well, they just have to perfecting the Windows drivers
and job done.

Tamas


>
> I agree broadly, but I'm not clear what the viable alternative was or is.
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