#: 4446 S10/Tandy CoCo
    17-Jun-90  18:32:42
Sb: #4443-Drive stepping
Fm: James Jones 76257,562
To: Denise Tomlinson 71021,3274

If information one needs isn't on the disk track the head currently is on, then
one has to move the head (i.e. seek, which on floppies uses the stepper motor).
Not much that an operating system can do to get around that, save for keeping
information in memory in one of several ways:

1. have it in ROM (e.g. DECB, all of whose commands are in ROM) 2. cache it (a
la Sardis Tech and at least some other "no-halt" controllers) 3. explicitly
load it (using the OS-9 load command to snarf stuff you use a lot into RAM so
that it doesn't have to get it from the disk every time)

In my startup file, I have a line that reads "load /dd/cmds/misc.utils", and I
have in that file the various commands that I have found that I use a lot. 
That can speed things up quite a bit.  Give it a try.