26 May
2020
26 May
'20
3:59 p.m.
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.