history is hard

Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
Tue May 26 17:59:47 CDT 2020


On Tue, 26 May 2020, Stan Sieler via cctalk wrote:

> Fred writes:
>   ..."MS-DOS 3.3 did not even come with a
> disk cache."
I definitely never said THAT.

> and discusses problems with SMARTDRV (in MS DOS 4.01 and later).
Yes, THAT I said, but in terms of Win3.10 installing SMARTDRV, rather than 
DOS 4.01

>
> I'm not sure if it was technically a form of caching, but the AmigaDOS
> delayed floppy write (well before MS-DOS cache) caused enormous problems
> for Amiga users.  (It may well have contributed significantly to the lack
> of market success.)
> Basic problem: you save something to a floppy, and pull it out.    You now
> have a corrupted floppy.  You needed to wait a few seconds for the OS to
> decide "well, looks like I better flush the last few dirty sectors out to
> that floppy".
>
> (I contend it was a form of write caching, designed to speed writing to
> floppies where writing tended to occur in nearby places.)

Yes, I would agree with calling it that, although different reasons why it 
was done.




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