From: Christopher Croughton <crough45 AT amc DOT de>
Message-Id: <97Sep15.140615gmt+0100.11649@internet01.amc.de>
Subject: Re: ClosedDOS???
To: ark AT mpak DOT convey DOT ru
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 13:11:11 +0100
Cc: crough45 AT amc DOT de, opendos AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <349@mpak.convey.ru> from "-= ArkanoiD =-" at Sep 15, 97 00:34:40 am
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-= ArkanoiD =- wrote:
> 
> Nope,it was IBM BASICA. The difference is that gwbasic was a line-oriented
> interactive thing - not bad for simple calculations,something like
> programmable calculator. qbasic has some stupid full-screen environment and
> does not run simple scripts by one <enter> as gwbasic did.

Ah, I remember it.  It didn't run on a lot of the clones, though, for
some reason so I didn't use it.  For a while I used Microsoft's old
CP/M BASIC under a Z80 emulator <g>...

> No one will do something more complex with basic anyways.

Some people still do, but it's not really BASIC any more.  No line numbers,
no LET statement, all this structured stuff - why not just use C++?

> I remember there are some.. btw Hyperdisk (not exactly PD,it is shareware)
> is lightning fast being compared with NWCACHE (and with smartdrive too..)
> 
> btw NWCACHE slows down terribly on fragmented disks.

Not a good sign, I feel...

> ..actually i don't care anymore - i have 4mb hardware chache on my IDE 
> subsystem and i'm going to add 4 more for scsi..

I haven't bothered with SCSI.  Why pay twice as much for no noticable
improvement over EIDE?

> > never had any problems with delayed write and SMARTDRV, except that in old
> > versions it used to disable interrupts for far too long and clobbe comms.
> > Of course there's the problem if you switch off or reboot the machine, but
> > that's the problem with delayed write cache in general not with SMARTDRV
> > in particular.
> 
> I've seen people who had problems with it all the time. I'm not sure it
> does even handle 3-finger salute correctly.

It does, at least the 6.22 version.

But if I want to be certain then I tell it to flush anyway, I don't trust any
cache to cope properly with resets.

Chris