On Jun 27, 2011, at 1:55 PM, David Holland wrote:
> ...
>
>> It took the invention of that paragon of OS's - DOS - to teach
>> the populace that simply pulling the device/media was an acceptable
>> operating procedure.
>
> That's hardly fair. Until the Mac appeared in 1984 every small
> computer that had a floppy drive had a floppy drive you could
> open/eject arbitrarily, and none of them required explicit unmount.
> This was true of at least some bigger systems as well; as I recall
> RT-11 did not require explictly unmounting floppies before changing
> them.
Sure it is fair. The fact that some operating systems had extremely
simple/primitive file systems without any caching means that those systems were
capable of surviving file device pulls. But it isn't reasonable to consider
that a feature. RT-11 was in fact an unusual example in its days; few if any
operating systems of that era had a "just yank it" property.
paul
