Files as files

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_at_infinet.com>
Date: Wed Jun 10 09:38:05 1998

>
> At 06:38 PM 6/9/98 PDT, Max Eskin wrote:

> The other non-file info such as the filename itself, the date stamp,
> attributes, etc. are treated in an incidental fashion. The Amiga
> file system, for example, had a "file comment" of about 80 characters
> of extra text to describe the file that wasn't always preserved.
> This may have been inherited from Tripos.

AFAIK, this is the case. The same with the ? and # as wild card
characters (instead of *, you use #? to indicate an unknown number
of "?")
 
> And then there's the way something like the effects of Radix-50
> (packing three chars into two bytes) has percolated through the
> years as three-character filename extensions from RT-11 (or
> earlier?) to CP/M to DOS and Windows, which are overused and
> abused in many ways.

OS/8 uses 6.2 filenames, packed as two six-bit ASCII values per 12-bit
word. I do not know if ODS-1 (RSX FILES-11) or the RSTS filesystems
precede RT-11, but if I had to guess, I would say yes. IIRC, both use
9.3.


-ethan
Received on Wed Jun 10 1998 - 09:38:05 BST