Re: [NTLK] What's in the Soup?

From: Richard G. DAVIS (msys1_at_charter.net)
Date: Mon May 10 2004 - 15:17:25 PDT


Anton has presented a detailed commentary on my earlier message that is
certainly instructional.

Two points:

1. AS is often the case in teaching subject matter to many students, there
are some liberties taken as a practical matter of communicating with some at
the expense of others. Anton raises correctly the fact that I have taken
some liberties with the 'truth'. Nonetheless, the general geneaology of the
time span of interest to me in answering the question is still useful. (Do
we want to visit the book of Genesis to discover the first order antecedents
of the issue at hand?)

2. Of more importance, Anton has introduced comments, that while astute
observations in their own right, are far from the issue I addressed. My
comments are intended to be INDEPENDENT of underlying implementation issues.

What this means is that the higher level abstraction (design) is not in any
way dependent on the underlying hardware technology. (A standard to be
approached as closely as is possible, but seldom achieved in practice.)

The platform hardware is ideally completely hidden from the system. His
comments of hardware and related matters are not needed in making
distinctions between Newton Soups and other long-term system storage
designs. The essential distinctions I see, as the original question
invited, are pertinent without regard to any particular hardware
implementation. (Any long-term storage system can be implemented with only
ping pong balls colored black or white, and people, lots of people to pick
them up as instructed. ...and of course, an unlimited access to a huge
number of MacDonald's restaurants.)

In the primary focus of interest here, the Newton, it is worth noting that
the hardware platform evolved dramatically from the original Message Pad 100
through the 2100 with modest impact on forward and backward compatibility.
(Granted, Apple did 'orphan' early adopters in some ways, as is the
inclination of profit driven engineering.)

Anyway, thanks Anton.

Regards,

Richard.

(Are we having fun yet?)

-- 
Richard Davis
Mformation SYStems Company
   tel:  508-869-6976
   fax:  508-869-6008
e-mail:  msys1_at_charter.net
> From: Anton Aylward <anton_at_the-wire.com>
> Reply-To: newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net
> Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 16:49:30 -0400
> To: newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net
> Subject: Re: [NTLK] What's in the Soup?
> 
> On Mon, 2004-05-10 at 15:46, Richard G. DAVIS wrote:
>> However, classical files are not structured by rules embedded in the
>> operating system.  A Windows file can be structured anyway the designer of
>> applications that will use the file wants to set up these files.
> 
> Blech.  Check your history.
...
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