Importing binary files without removable storage nor non-bundled software (was: TKermitFTP

[Dwight K. Elvey]

>From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at siconic.com>
>
>On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>
>> Vintage Computer Festival declared on Wednesday 05 January 2005 11:19 pm:
>> > On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Pete Turnbull wrote:
>> > > Dunno, I don't have quite such old versions :-)  My old copy of "The
>> > > MS-DOS Bible" says "every version" -- it means 3.30 and older --
>> > > disallows binary reads from devices.  The same message is at 5254 in
>> > > MS-DOS 3.30 (ditto in PC-DOS 3.30), at 4CA0 in 3.21, and 4CCC in
>> > > IBM-DOS 4.01 (from a Compaq).  I can't read my MS-DOS 2.10 and 2.11
>> > > disks on the hardware I have here.  "Binary reads from a device are
>> > > not allowed" is the message at 8753 in DR-DOS 3.41.
>> >
>> > The question I haven't seen answered yet is, "Well, why the hell
>> > not???"
>>
>> Well, my guess would be that it has no way to determine the EOF coming
>> over the line, as it can't just "check the file length", unless there's
>> a ^Z there to indicate it.  Thus, ASCII mode is needed.
>
>And the programmers were not smart enough to figure a way around this
>because...why?

Hi
 It would have been trivial for them to adopt a simple
block transfer for serial binary at the begining. I suspect
that the reason they didn't do this was that they didn't
wan't people to transfer programs from machine to machine.
Can you imaging. 1 million people with computers and they
only sold one OS.
Dwight