8 Sep
2012
8 Sep
'12
6:16 a.m.
On 7 September 2012 21:07, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
HIMEM.SYS "solved" the "RAM CRAM"
issues of too many TSRs.
Not really, no. It gave you just 64K of "High RAM". There was a
special version of Novell's NETX.EXE to go in there, and MS-DOS 5 or
above could relocate some DOS data structures and things in there, but
64K wasn't much.
It was Upper Memory Blocks - UMBs - that were the real solution, and
that meant a 386 and EMM385.EXE or Quaterdeck QEMM386.
3.10 also installed SMARTDRV, (misconfigured to enable
write cacheing,
altered write sequence, and return to DOS prompt without first writing the
buffers).
I was always careful, trained my clients to be, and never had a problem.
Correcting that misconfiguration was the change that
differentiated MS-DOS 6.20 from 6.00, and "fixed the problems with disk
compression".
MS-DOS 6.0 contained DoubleSpace.
Then, STAC sued over code stolen from Stacker, and won.
Result: MS-DOS 6.1: no disk compression
Then, it was re-implemented with clean code - still a theft of the
concept, but not the code - as DriveSpace and release in MS-DOS 6.2.
Then there were 2 minor bug-fixes, 6.21 and 6.22.
I don't recall SMARTDRV being a major factor.
--
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