Accessing partitions in drive images

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 1:32 PM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
>>   Though I do think a little more foresight on the part of IBM and
>> Microsoft both would have saved us all a lot of trouble down the road.
>
> At the time, (1) IBM was Big Iron and (2) the desktop computer market
> was tiny with only a few non-hobby systems available.

  I'm not sure what the first point has to do with this, but I don't
agree with the second: The lack of expectation of a huge market
doesn't justify all the drain bamage on the IBM-PC and MS-DOS.  I'm
not talking about things like the 1 MB address space.  That's a
limitation of the hardware at that price point at that time.
Inconvenient later, but it was a conscious design trade-off.  I'm
talking about how incredibly idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and outright
buggy the stuff was (and is), and/or cases where the poorer of two
equal cost options was chosen.  A small market doesn't justify that.

  One could argue the IBM 5150 itself was never intended to be
anything but a quick-and-dirty solution, and I might even buy that,
but the quick-and-dirty seems to have kept on well after the IBM-PC
architecture stopped being a stop-gap product line.  :)

  Then again, at $WORK we're currently trying to figure out the
atrocity known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, so maybe it's
just the fact that everything to do with a computer always sucks.  :-)

-- Ben