Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hpcuhb!hpindda!tribby
From: tribby@hpindda.HP.COM (David Tribby)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Comments on GS/OS
Message-ID: <6230017@hpindda.HP.COM>
Date: 27 Sep 88 17:09:39 GMT
Organization: HP Information Networks Group/Cupertino CA
Lines: 36

A few observations after working with OS/GS for a couple of evenings...

Booting up is much faster for 3.5 inch disks. On my system, it took 73
seconds to go from power-up to the Finder on ProDOS 16; it only took
40 seconds for GS/OS. There is not much difference between ProDOS 16 and
GS/OS when booting from the Sider hard disk.

Apple dropped several programs from the system disk: the Launcher,
System Utilities (e.g. copying files from Pascal) and Fast Copy. The
old versions still work under GS/OS.

The APDA documentation doesn't describe the Advanced Disk Utility. It 
doesn't look like it does much for me because I can format 3.5 and 5.25
floppies from the Finder, and it doesn't recognize my Sider for
partitioning. I am *real* curious about one aspect: what is the difference
between formatting a 3.5 disk as "800K  2:1" and "800K  4:1"?

The Finder no longer has a "Quit" entry in the "Files" menu. Instead,
look for it under "Special." When I tried erasing a write protected
disk, the "Try Again" did not work...I had to enter the command again.
I loaded a file into the clipboard (via another program) and tried to
look at it with "Show Clipboard." The first part of the file came out
fine, but scrolling does not work. (The last line was duplicated rather
than adding new text during a scroll-down.) Some of the additions to
the Finder not only are useful...they look good too! The Finder comes
as START in the SYSTEM folder; change the name if you don't want it to
be the startup program.

The Installer makes for a very smooth update process...if you have two
drives. (Quite a bit of disk swapping if you depend upon only one!) I
waited on the Installer (once) because it does not get rid of the "clock" 
cursor when it was done with its task.

--Dave Tribby
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