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52 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
52 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
## CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION
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Beneath Apple DOS is intended to serve as a companion to Apple's DOS Manual,
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providing additional information for the advanced programmer or the novice Apple
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user who wants to know more about the structure of diskettes. It is not the
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intent of this manual to replace the documentation provided by Apple Computer
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Inc. Although, for the sake of continuity, some of the material covered in the
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Apple manual is also covered here, it will be assumed that the reader is
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reasonably familiar with the contents of the DOS Manual. Since all chapters
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presented here may not be of use to each Apple owner, each has been written to
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stand on its own.
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The information presented here is a result of intensive disassembly and
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annotation of various versions of DOS by the authors and by other experienced
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systems programmers. It also draws from application notes, articles, and
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discussions with knowledgeable people. This manual was not prepared with the
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assistance of Apple Computer Inc. Although no guarantee can be made concerning
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the accuracy of the information presented here, all of the material included in
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Beneath Apple DOS has been thoroughly researched and tested.
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There were several reasons for writing Beneath Apple DOS:
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- To show direct assembly language access to DOS.
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- To help you to fix clobbered diskettes.
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- To correct errors and omissions in the Apple documentation.
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- To allow you to customize DOS to fit your needs.
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- To provide complete information on diskette formatting.
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When Apple Computer Inc. introduced its Disk Operating System (DOS) version 3 in
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1978 to support the new DISK II drive, very little documentation was provided.
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Later, when DOS 3.2 was released, a 178 page instructional and reference manual
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became available covering the use of DOS from BASIC in depth and even touched
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upon some of the internal workings of DOS. With the advent of DOS 3.3, the old
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3.2 manual was updated but the body of information in it remained essentially
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intact. Beyond these Apple manuals, there have been no significant additions to
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the documentation on DOS, apart from a few articles in APPLE user group
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magazines and newsletters. This manual takes up where the Disk Operating System
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Manual leaves off.
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Throughout this manual, discussion centers primarily on DOS version 3.3. The
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reasons for this are that 3.3 was the most recent release of DOS at the time of
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this writing and that it differs less from DOS 3.2 than one would imagine.
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Wherever there is a major difference between the various DOS releases in a given
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topic, each release will be covered.
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In addition to the DOS dependent information provided, many of the discussions
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also apply to other operating systems on the Apple II and Apple III. For
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example, disk formatting at the track and sector level is, for the most part,
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the same.
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.nx ch2
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