On 2020-05-26 22:06, Stan Sieler via cctalk wrote:
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.)
They probably would just have to implement a "sync" command, and tell people to use use it before ejecting a disk...
regards, chris
