26 May
2020
26 May
'20
1:06 p.m.
Fred writes:
..."MS-DOS 3.3 did not even come with a
disk cache."
and discusses problems with SMARTDRV (in MS DOS 4.01 and later).
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.)
Stan