DOS ain't dead

"SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 11.03.2010, 19:25

> > On Wikipedia I found a link to the "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk
> > Optimizer", a very early defrag utility,
>
> Very interesting find.

Yet another (Turbo) Pascal gem: "defrag 10 MB HD in 8 minutes", no small feat considering the slow cpus of the day! Even though it's limited to 32 MB (FAT12), it's still interesting.

To be honest, (on a semi-related note) I wonder why more tools don't use the FAT directly for greater speed. I guess nobody wants to write their own FAT12/16/32-specific routines (reinvent the wheel), esp. when direct sector access won't work under Windows anyways. Charles Dye's LOCATE does, though, providing greater speed. (I also wonder if some DOS extenders would benefit from this, e.g. wouldn't be limited to 64k at a time when reading from files.)

> > I didn't try running or building this tool. Maybe it's useful to
> someone.

Well, we do have FreeDOS Defrag, which supports other FATs (-16, -32), albeit slowly, but this is a good alternative for reference.

> The same author of SST; Alfred J. Heyman has also kindly made the source
> available for at least one other program:
> BigShell
> for autocad

Now this is confusing. I guess the larger code size (32-bit) meant less conventional memory free, thus his need to work around it. I didn't really look too closely, but I'm blindly guessing his shell (when run first) saves the state then "restores" it by dumping out / overwriting AutoCAD in memory. (What DOS extender did AutoCAD use? Most good ones allow you to configure to use EMS or XMS, reducing conventional memory, if needed.)

Complete thread:

• "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found - rr, 08.03.2010, 22:36 (Developers)
  • "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found - Arjay, 11.03.2010, 16:13
    • "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found - Rugxulo, 11.03.2010, 19:25
      • "SST - Seek Stopper Hard Disk Optimizer" found - RayeR, 12.03.2010, 02:13
  • "SST - Seek Stopper" -- Caching Needed, Too! - Jack, 12.03.2010, 22:35