Message-ID: <3395A90C.1116@piper.hamline.edu>
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 1997 12:42:36 -0500
From: Randall Maas <rcmaas AT piper DOT hamline DOT edu>
Reply-To: rcmaas AT piper DOT hamline DOT edu
Organization: Geek Week
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Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: "Make DJGPP shine bright, make it Windows..." Ugh II.
References: <m0wWMoW-000S1qC AT natacha DOT inti DOT edu DOT ar> <19970528 DOT 142219 DOT 7127 DOT 1 DOT fwec AT juno DOT com> <01bc6bde$dc37fde0$93e437c0 AT usd DOT edu DOT usd DOT edu>
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Stefan Braunewell wrote:
> Still - why not just have a nice big button, that you can actually use even
> *without* a tool?

That is a good point.  However the Mac, Unix and MSDOS/Windows all have
their advantages/disadvantages.  (For all of UNIX's power, it makes very
little sense to have "mount" a floppy disk...).  As I recall, the Mac
had to really clever reasons for this mechanism.  The first was that the
Mac File System is some-what more efficient (than dos's) because it uses
caching and updated a b-tree to provide fast access.  Having the disk
come and go a random times meant either: real ugly failure modes, or
taking a very conservative approach (no caching and constantly checking
for disks).  Windows and OS/2 uses the later, and can be a real pain if
you take the disk out when it is expecting it (I've actually crashed NT
this way...).

The second reason, was that you could have each of the floppies on the
desktop, although they weren't in the drive.  In the modern era (ie,
cheap harddisks) this is kinda not so useful (esp. since "xcopy" for DOS
is much more efficient to copy between floppies than the Mac's native
method..)

Randy Maas
rcmaas AT piper DOT hamline DOT edu