[rescue] Disposing Of OS/2 Apps

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Dan Duncan <danduncan at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/03/23 Fri PM 11:46:57 CDT
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Disposing Of OS/2 Apps

>On 3/23/07, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
>> What did Win95 take, something like 20 or 21 diskettes? I remember having to
>> "make" a set of Win95 diskettes for my Libretto 50, and when I decided to
>> rebuild the system with a bigger HD, it was a ROYAL pain to slowly feed in
>> each of the 20 or so diskettes...
>
>Yuck.  I remember getting an install of some Corel product dumped on me
>around 1994 by a cow-orker who had to go to lunch around disk 4 of 20 or
>so.  The system would literally grind away for 10 minutes on each floppy
>because they were using some heavy compression scheme and decompressing
>each floppy on the fly instead of spooling them to hard drive and decompressing
>there.  I wondered at the time why some people at Corel had jobs.

The thing that always amazed me on PCs whas how *everything* would (essentially) stop when you accessed a floppy disk. It seems that your computer's CPU was really the controller for the floppy drive - a throwback to the early Apple computers where I know that was the case (and the source of numerous "anti-piracy" efforts, because you could change almost anything).

Windows 2003 Servers (coming off the line at Dell, HP, etc.) all have floppy options, because MS hasn't seen fit to incorporate access to a driver CD into their install process - RAID drivers that are not bundled with the OS have to be loaded in via floppy if they are needed for installation...

BUT, MS did have one good idea - they made the Vista installation go very fast, because they don't pull files off the DVD in a random order like they used to, instead they made a file by file copy of an installed system onto the DVD, and they unload the files to the HD without any real processing, except to trim what is copied/activated on the installed computer due to license key setting (Vista Basic, Premium, Business, Ultimate...) it makes the install go much faster than it otherwise would have...

Of course, putting all the bits for every version of Vista on the install DVD can be good for inventory/Mfg (only one SKU for media), but it will be quite tempting for hackers to find a way to turn the Vista Home installation that came with their PC into Vista Ultimate.

AFAIK, no one has publicly craked the license key settings (yet), but I'm not really too tuned into those activities - if it isn't on slashdot, boingboing, or linux.com I wouldn't be aware of it...

Lionel