defrag

[Wojciech Puchar]

> > CP/M was single-user and was used on floppies up to 360kB AFAIK,
>
> And MP/M was multi-user, using the same filesystem.  From memory, there
> was perhaps one byte that indicated which user owned a file :)

in CP/M there were "users" too, but it was just to help keeping it clear, 
not for security, you could simply type user <n> to switch users AFAIK.

>
> It wasn't (straight-up) theft; MS cut a deal with IBM to use HPFS and
> OS/2, more or less in exchange for letting IBM licence Windows 3.1 as
> WINOS/2
>
> When things went sour - google provides days of happy reading if you're
> interested - MS morphed it into NTFS for NT, cruelled the deal with IBM
> so OS/2 couldn't run NT/Win95 apps (signing OS/2's death warrant, though
> it took a long time to die) and stopped distributing OS/2 themselves.

a little better than theft but... as you said

> > writing a few-paged document or view a webpage
>
> Yeah, yeah :)  I'd be surprised if NTFS isn't as defrag-proof as HPFS,
> which as I recall had self-defragging garbage-collecting features built

exactly like in microsoft. they quickly created similar filesystem not 
even really understanding it, or if they did - simply ignoring things.

> used it for quite a few years to run BBS and Fidonet stuff, not once
> losing any data .. HPFS was a very resiliant and reliable filesystem.

i never used OS/2 for really long, my friend was. it was faster than FAT 
by much, and never had FS crash.