On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 02:00:54PM -0400, Paul Koning 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.
It is not fair to blame it on DOS; DOS was neither the first nor the last system to work this way. Many of them had caching (even writeback caching!) too. > 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. Oh, I'm not saying it's a feature. However, requiring explicit unmount (up to and including killing off uncooperating or leftover processes) is not a feature either. -- David A. Holland dholl...@netbsd.org