Indeed. DOS had primitive disk caching, but it flushed all caches before returning to the command prompt, for continuity with the time when it had no caching at

Indeed. DOS had primitive disk caching, but it flushed all caches before returning to the command prompt, for continuity with the time when it had no caching at all. So if you saw C:\>, you could safely turn the computer off. You wanted to exit Windows before cutting the power. Another wrinkle to this is that many computers' power switches were physical switches on the power supply that directly closed or opened the circuit supplying power to the computer. There was no way for the computer to switch itself off like in today's ACPI-mediated world, so the user had to be told when to turn the computer off. Just goes to show how backward and primitive the PC was until well into the 90s. Macs had been shutting themselves off, and ejecting their floppy drives, since 1984.