55 replies to this topic

[kheller2]

Does anyone know of the history of DOS 3? I'm curious about how such a thing came into being and later how it was addressed with DOS 2.5. DOS XE might even be good history.. although I just don't know why they didn't modify 2.0D.

Crazy stuff man! crazy...

[Rybags]

I think it came out very shortly after the 1050 drive (which itself would have debuted not long after the 1200XL).

It was a joke in most respects, from memory used an 8-sector cluster size.

About the only good thing I remember of it is that NOTE and POINT worked with proper relative offsets to the start of file rather than referring to absolute sector number.

[Nukey Shay]

IIRC Dos 3 was supposed to be the "user-friendly" Dos. Due to Atari's knack of fixing things that aren't broken, it didn't exactly live up to the theory. Dos 2.5 was damage control

[ijor]

DOS 3 wasn't too good, we all agree. But I am not sure it was as bad as its reputation. What contributed to its quick death was the (almost) total lack of backwards compatibility with DOS 2.

Atari could have licensed or acquired a third party one with much better results. Hey, just imagine MyDos or SpartaDos as the new Atari DOS.

[kheller2]

Right.. I'm not saying DOS 3 was good. I did in fact have to use it for some time before learning about DOS 2.x.. It was the only DOS that came with the 1050 for a window of time.

There were also a bug fixed version that was released. I remember there being some white card included with DOS 3 that said to check certain memory locations to see if you had some bugs.

I'm guessing since DOS 1-2 was done by OSS(ish) folks, that 3.0 was Atari's first stab at their own DOS. But that just makes me wonder where the DOS 4.x rumor for the 1450s came from.

I guess only Curt could answer some of these questions...

[Gunstar]

Dos 3 was originally made specifically for the 1050 drive and it;s special format for enhanced density 130k disks. It's not that it was all that bad of a DOS, IMHO, but that it was incompatible with the DOS 2, MyDOS, TopDOS, etc. standard. And yes, 2.5 was damage control. But Atari also spent a TON of money on DOS 4 which was pretty amazing itself, and then was shelved and there was nothing new from Atari until DOS XE was made for the XF551 drive. Do a Google for DOS 4. It's online somewhere for download. IIRC, it's compatible with multiple densities and has a very user friendly and huge help system menu in it. I don't recall how compatible it was witht the 2.x standard. It was originally released through the Antic Software catalog as PD after Atari ditched it. Never mind looking, here's the image:

Edited by Gunstar, Fri Mar 2, 2007 12:42 AM.

[bf2k+]

... Never mind looking, here's the image:

Where?

[Urchlay]

Right.. I'm not saying DOS 3 was good. I did in fact have to use it for some time before learning about DOS 2.x.. It was the only DOS that came with the 1050 for a window of time.

There were also a bug fixed version that was released. I remember there being some white card included with DOS 3 that said to check certain memory locations to see if you had some bugs.

My first 1050 came with DOS 3, which didn't make me happy... I don't remember whether my copy of DOS 3 came with the white card or not, but I do remember one bug: If I ever tried to access the drive when the drive power was turned off, I'd get the expected error message (139, I think)... but if I then powered on the drive and tried again, I'd keep getting the same error! I actually had to reboot the Atari when this happened: there was no way to use the drive again after that happened.

Why did I turn off the drive in the first place? It ran hot, and I'd heard horror stories of overheating drives... Later on, I discovered that the guy with the overheating 1050 actually had a stack of 3 1050s and an 810, and the 1050 that had problems was the one sitting on top of the 810... and that my 1050 was fine even if it felt a little warm.

Does anyone remember the "extended DOS 2" from Bill Wilkinson's "Insight:Atari" column, in Compute? He rewrote parts of DOS 2.0S so it would work with the 1050 and actually use 1050 enhanced density, and published it as a set of patches (probably BASIC DATA statements and a loader). Did anyone ever actually use this DOS? I remember wanting to, but it was a set of patches to DOS 2.0S, which I didn't have... by the time I found a copy of 2.0S, Atari had already released 2.5, and I already had a copy of it.

[Gunstar]

... Never mind looking, here's the image:

Where?

Sorry, my computer crashed while attempting to zip and upload an image last night, and I forgot all about this post by the time I got it straightened out. I didn't even think the post edit went through...I'll get it up soon (the image)

[Curt Vendel]

I have some emails I'll dig up and share shortly...

There were actually two iterations of DOS 3, one internally that the engineers were working on and the marketing version that went out the door.

There was DOS 2.0D

Then others like 2.6f which I always personally loved.

OSS had actually written DOS XL for Atari, but Atari choose not to go with it and OSS brought it out itself, you could technically consider that DOS 3.0 in a sense.

QDOS or Dos 4.0 meant for the 1450XLD is yet another DOS which didn't exactly make it out, interestingly enough it was brought out through ANTIC's Disk subscription, curiously enough "Lizard" is another program done internally within Atari which was a phenomenal terminal program with multi device support and multimodes was later brought out also through ANTIC and called Chameleon.


DOS 2.5 was a great stopgap DOS and one of the nicer improvements to the DOS line, though still not up to the same level's of MYDOS or others.

DOS XE was very well done, some really good effort was put into one of the remaing Atari released products for the 8bits.

Curt

Does anyone know of the history of DOS 3? I'm curious about how such a thing came into being and later how it was addressed with DOS 2.5. DOS XE might even be good history.. although I just don't know why they didn't modify 2.0D.

Crazy stuff man! crazy...

[drac030]

... Never mind looking, here's the image:

Where?

http://atariki.krap....dex.php/DOS_4.0

http://drac030.krap.pl/DOS40_Atari.rar

[Urchlay]

Then others like 2.6f which I always personally loved.

I had (still have?) a copy of this that someone gave me a long time ago. Do you have any information about where it came from, what it was designed for? The guy who gave it to me told me the "F" is for "fast I/O", but I never noticed any speed boost. Was there ever any documentation for DOS 2.6f? Was it intended to be released, or was it just something someone was messing around with? How did this random guy end up with a copy of it? (Downloaded from a warez BBS, sure, but how did it get leaked in the first place?)

Heh, I don't ask for much, do I?

[Goochman]

I got a 1050 w/DOS 3 and began writing a new game in basic for it. I got far enough along when I realized DOS 3 was a POS - I then found out I couldnt transfer any of my work to a DOS 2.0 disk and therefore abandoned my project

Wish I could find the disk though - it was a neat adventure I was working on

[Gunstar]

I got a 1050 w/DOS 3 and began writing a new game in basic for it. I got far enough along when I realized DOS 3 was a POS - I then found out I couldnt transfer any of my work to a DOS 2.0 disk and therefore abandoned my project

Wish I could find the disk though - it was a neat adventure I was working on

Hmm...I didn't remember 3.0 being a POS, but then I quickly upgraded to the US Doubler&SpartaDOS back in the day. So maybe I just didn't use it enough to figure out it sucked. I do remember that most PD disks I got were either 2.0 or 2.5 format, I changed some over to SpartaDOS, but SpartaDOS can load Atari DOS disks too. I just figured DOS 3 wasn't like becuase of incompatibility issues with the 2.0 standard. The whole 1050 130k thing was BS anyway, single density just remained the standard for PD and shareware and always was with commercial, just to be compatible with all Atari drives, and then people upgraded drives to double-density if they wanted more storage space. Nobody ever ended up using 130K disks, unless you specifically made them for yourself and transfered 2.0 files to 3.0.

[Urchlay]

Nobody ever ended up using 130K disks, unless you specifically made them for yourself and transfered 2.0 files to 3.0.

I used a lot of 130K disks, once I got hold of DOS 2.5. I was *poor*, so I couldn't just throw away a third of the storage on each disk... I even wrote a utility that turned off the "uses extended sectors" bit in the directory, so my 130K DOS 2.5 disks would work with Fenders 3-sector game loader, and SpartaDOS/MyDOS could read the files in the extra sectors (the versions I had normally couldn't read the files with <> around them in DOS 2.5).

[kheller2]

Several DOS versions here: http://ape.dyndns.org:8083/DOS/

[Gunstar]

Nobody ever ended up using 130K disks, unless you specifically made them for yourself and transfered 2.0 files to 3.0.

I used a lot of 130K disks, once I got hold of DOS 2.5. I was *poor*, so I couldn't just throw away a third of the storage on each disk... I even wrote a utility that turned off the "uses extended sectors" bit in the directory, so my 130K DOS 2.5 disks would work with Fenders 3-sector game loader, and SpartaDOS/MyDOS could read the files in the extra sectors (the versions I had normally couldn't read the files with <> around them in DOS 2.5).

I know where you are coming from, and I always intended to use enhanced density to save disks, but I was too lazy to bother in the end, and back then I used to "borrow" a lot of floppy disks from my high school, so it wasn't a big deal, and then I soon bought the US Doubler kit from money I saved in a summer job, so I skipped 130k and went straight to 180k or 360k "flippies" with my trusty hole puncher.

In this day and age, all you need is MyDOS and/or SpartaDOS, both of which still have support with periodic updates, and both can read and/or write to 2.0 and 2.5 disks. They are also the main two supported by new hardware that is being released like MyIDE or the new MIO boards, etc. and are the two DOS's used or supported by traditional hard drives and floppy drive upgrades for the 8-bits. It really comes down to preference in the traditional Atari DOS menu-driven system (MyDOS) or the command line driven traditional MS-DOS like system (SpartaDOS). There are a few rebels who like DOS XE.

Edited by Gunstar, Fri Mar 2, 2007 11:33 PM.

[bf2k+]

Does anyone remember the "extended DOS 2" from Bill Wilkinson's "Insight:Atari" column, in Compute? He rewrote parts of DOS 2.0S so it would work with the 1050 and actually use 1050 enhanced density, and published it as a set of patches (probably BASIC DATA statements and a loader). Did anyone ever actually use this DOS? I remember wanting to, but it was a set of patches to DOS 2.0S, which I didn't have... by the time I found a copy of 2.0S, Atari had already released 2.5, and I already had a copy of it.

Yes. I typed in those patches and used the DOS a little. Don't remember having any problems with it.

But back then I was playing with forem & amis BBS's and had several modified DOSes for accessing my quad density drives thru the Amdek 3" drive controller. I vaguely remember having to do some strange things to the disks (like blanking out parts of the VTOC etc). I wish I still had some of that hardware.

[kheller2]

I was just going through some boxes of 8bit stuff and found that little white reference card.

"ATARI DOS 3 REFERENCE MANUAL ERRATA 05/01/84"

One page of fixes, mostly to the "BIRTHDAY" program.

The back has this for historical folks:

"ATARI DOS 3 ANOMALIES

Early versions of ATARI DOS 3 used a random access method that was incompatible with large files. To determine if you have an early version, boot your copy of ATARI DOS 3 with ATARI BASIC, and execute the following command from ATARI BASIC:

PRINT PEEK (1816)

If the value returned is '53', your copy of ATARI DOS 3 is a current version and does not require modification.

If the value returned is '51' or '56', please contact ATARI Customer Relations at one of the toll free numbers or address listed below, to obtain a program which will update ATARI DOS 3 to the current revision level."

There was no address or number listed. =)

This means there where at least three version of DOS 3 (hah hah) released.

Also, something I had forgotten, but the 1050 seems to have shipped with DOS 2.0, DOS 3.0 and DOS 2.5. I have a silver branded 1050 DOS II manual that is basically the same thing as the 800 version but with a different cover and some blurbs on the front stating to ignore the 815 references and that your 1050 is functions the same as the 810 and your 1200XL as an 800..


Also, Curt states here: http://www.atariage....s...st&p=800461 That there was a an internal version of DOS 3 that was much better than what was released. Hmm....

Edited by kheller2, Sun Mar 4, 2007 9:56 PM.

[kheller2]

Why does Indus GT/ OSS Dos XL 2.30 remind me of a cross between Sparta DOS CLI and Atari DOS 3.x menu?

[_The Doctor__]

I have some emails I'll dig up and share shortly...

There were actually two iterations of DOS 3, one internally that the engineers were working on and the marketing version that went out the door.

There was DOS 2.0D

Then others like 2.6f which I always personally loved.

OSS had actually written DOS XL for Atari, but Atari choose not to go with it and OSS brought it out itself, you could technically consider that DOS 3.0 in a sense.

QDOS or Dos 4.0 meant for the 1450XLD is yet another DOS which didn't exactly make it out, interestingly enough it was brought out through ANTIC's Disk subscription, curiously enough "Lizard" is another program done internally within Atari which was a phenomenal terminal program with multi device support and multimodes was later brought out also through ANTIC and called Chameleon.


DOS 2.5 was a great stopgap DOS and one of the nicer improvements to the DOS line, though still not up to the same level's of MYDOS or others.

DOS XE was very well done, some really good effort was put into one of the remaing Atari released products for the 8bits.

Curt

I've been waiting a long time for e-mails.... snail mail is taking on a new meaning

[tschak909]

A Few things to say about DOS 3, as I've studied it about as much as one can by disassembling it:

 

* The OS was obviously meant for much larger capacity disks that never materialized. The bitmap based file allocation tables and 8 allocation unit minimum size for a file seems to indicate this. It was just never extended beyond the 1050, although it looks like there are data structures in DOS 3 to do just this.

* The OS was written by Bill Wilkinson of OSS, just as was done with DOS 1, DOS 2.0S, 2.0D, 2.5, and ADOS (DOS XE).

* The file allocation system that DOS 3 had, would it have been tweaked a bit better, is actually miles better than the original Atari DOS filesystem as was handed on spec to Shepardson Microsystems by Atari, as it didn't rely on wasting bytes at the end of a sector for a linked list, but had something very much like FAT.

 

-Thom 

[tschak909]

Also I find almost _NOBODY_ talking about OSS OS/A+ 4.1, AT ALL... which is very troubling, as it was also a very good DOS. It utilized a port of the Apple DOS 3.3 filesystem to the Atari, which gave very large filenames (with spaces), and explicit file types...not to mention a filesystem that would have handled the Atari's maximum sector size in CIO (65535 sectors) quite nicely.

 

-Thom

[zzip]

Dos 3 came with my 1050, so it was the first DOS I ever used.   I thought it had a nice menu system.   Then going back to DOS 2.x's interface after being used to 3 was jarring to say the least!   Main reason I had to was that 2.x was compatible with everything and 3 wasn't.

[MrFish]

* The OS was written by Bill Wilkinson of OSS, just as was done with DOS 1, DOS 2.0S, 2.0D, 2.5, and ADOS (DOS XE).

 

DOS 1.0 & 2.0S were written by Paul Laughton. DOS 2.5 was just a modified version of 2.0S, so Laughton essentially wrote much of it.