🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently noticed some strange behaviour issuing from my ST.  I have
a 520STfm, one of the new ones with the built-in double-sided drive
and the so-called "Mega" roms.  Here's the strangeness:

Cold boot the machine with a freshly-TOS-formatted disk in drive A:.
Open a window for A: on the desktop, and create a folder (called
"FOLDER", say) on the blank disk.  Double click on FOLDER to get
a subdirectory showing "0 bytes used in 0 items".  Go ahead and hit
the escape key a gazillion times.  All that will happen is that the
screen window updates; the drive never comes on, since the current
subdirectory is cached, and no media change is detected.

Now remove this disk from drive A: and insert another blank disk (or
at least, one which doesn't have any folders at all on it).  Hit
<esc>; the drive spins, and the (non-existent) sub-directory on the
new disk gets read.  Now, the next few presses of the escape key
won't do anything besides update the window on the screen, but every
fourth press of escape _will_ force the disk to be re-read.  I'm not
sure why it's doing this, but for some reason every fourth press of
escape is forcing a media change.  Note that this doesn't happen
under "normal" circumstances.  I think I recall from somewhere that
Alan Pratt said he was going to make <esc> force a media change in
TOS 1.4, but the only way I can force a media change with my roms is
if I hit <esc> four times and the window on my screen is showing a
non-existent subdirectory on a disk which _doesn't have any other
subdirectories_.

What happens if the disk does have other subdirectories?  Glad you
asked; this is the really weird part.  Remove the second disk from
drive A: and insert a third disk, this one with a least one folder on
it, but _without_ a folder called "FOLDER".  Hit <esc>; the drive
spins, and the (non-existent) sub-directory gets read.  BUT...No
matter how many times I hit <esc> from here on in, the drive light
never comes on and the disk never gets read.  In fact, my machine
COMPLETELY REFUSES TO RECOGNIZE A MEDIA CHANGE.  I can take out the
third disk and insert any disk whatsoever, but no amount of standing
on the escape key will read the new disk.  The only way that I can
force a read is to back out of the FOLDER subdirectory to the root.

What's the explanation for all this strangeness?  Should I worry
about it?  I'm fairly sure that my other ST (a 1040 with the old
roms) doesn't exhibit this behaviour (though I haven't actually
gotten around to verifying it).  Ever since I started using the 520
at work (my 1040 is now at home), I've noticed that WordPerfect has
been trashing a lot of files.  The only explanation I could get out
of WordPerfectCorp is that WP doesn't live very happily on small
machines.  But now I'm wondering if WP's internal directory caching
isn't running headlong into this strange little "feature" of TOS that
I've located.

Comments?  BBB

Bob Bright <BRIGHT@DALAC.BITNET>
Philosophy Dept.
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS  B3H 3J5