history is hard (was: Microsoft open sources GWBASIC)

[Guy Sotomayor]

On Mon, 2020-05-25 at 13:21 -0700, Ali wrote:
> 
> >I hadn't thought about IBMCACHE.SYS in *years*.  I wrote it in its
> >entirety (there's even a patent that covers some of its operation).
> I
> >was in an AdTech (Advanced Technology) group at the time and was
> >looking at how to make disk operations faster in >DOS at the time
> when I
> >came up with the idea.
> 
> >There was a *huge* battle within IBM on if it >should be released
> and in
> >order to do so, it was fairly well hidden.
> 
> 
> Guy,
> 
> It is so well hidden I don't think I have ever seen it. Was it part
> of pc-dos? If so what version?

No, it came on one of the diskettes supplied with PS/2 systems though
it would work on any system.  That is, it didn't do anything to detect
that it was running on a PS/2 system.  There was a lot of discussion to
have the "core" of IBMCACHE actually in BIOS and a tiny .SYS file to
allocate the memory above 1MB.

Most interest in it faded when Microsoft started shipping smartdrv.sys
which IMHO was not as good as IBMCACHE, but smartdrv.sys came with DOS.

TTFN - Guy