Date   : Tue, 17 Jan 1984 09:55:00 PST
From   : ACB.TYM@office-2
Subject: Function 37 ..sigh.

I have tried to hold off, but I can resist no longer.  Jerry tries to share
his 
experience (is that not what this forum is for) and he is dumped on.   Such 
activity keeps me from sharing some of my experiences.  I am implementing LRU 
disk caches in the BIOS and am lamenting over the inability of the BIOS
to tell 
when to flush the cache.  It is very unfriendly to leave the directory
tracks of
an old disk in the cache (the old disk can be kept whole by using a write 
through cache) when allocating new files on a new disk.

Most schemes that are safe (no explicit action required to insure integrity of 
disks) end up flushing the cache every warm boot because the BIOS cannot 
distinguish between the first disk selection after warm boot (innocent)
and the 
first disk selection after a change (requires flush).  This is ok for long 
sessions in database applications but not good when in an edit, compile, test 
loop.  I would be interested in the experiences of others but wary of being 
assumed to be an idiot.

Judging from the volume of the reaction to the Function 37 remarks, there
are a 
lot of people out there waiting to pounce an a cause.  Long live Function
37!  I
certainly won't use it until someone explain's Jerry's information.

By the way, how silly it is to see 22 lines of mail header just to see some 
joker ask whether anyone has received BYTE.  Darn! I guess I will get lectured 
about how, If I wanted to spend the time (or how utility "X" on system
"Y" will 
solve the problem) I could write a program to filter the header.  If all that 
garbage were written on a Postal envelope, the mail never would be delivered.
 I
am not interested in the Odyssey of such a foolish letter, only the author.