LIMITS (Was: 286/SLT and HDDs

On Wed, 5 Jun 2013, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus wrote: MS-DOS 6.22 is my favorite version. 6.2x was the first [and only?] version of DOS where improving reliability was the primary design goal. 6.20 fixed the "disk compression problems", by cutting back the inappropriately aggressive SMARTDRV configuration, and made dozens of bug-fixes The "disk compression problems" were called that because people encountered them after installing disk compression, but all of the actual reported problems were due to shutdown before write-caching completed its writes. The repair consisted of: default of no write-cacheing (V previous default of on) NOT displaying the DOS prompt until the buffers were written ("Save the file, back at the prompt, I can hit the power switch now) NOT rearranging disk writes (for efficiency). Rearranging caused DIR entries to be written BEFORE the data was written, sometimes with power going away befre the write. Write-cacheing also meant that writes were reported to be successful before they were attempted. A write error could not be recovered from. "Data Error Writing Drive C: Retry?" (no "(A)bort", "(I)gnore", or "(F)fail" options) to then be able to try again. 6.21 removed the disk compression, due to the STAC Electronics lawsuit 6.22 brought it back in a non-infringing version -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com