MS-DOS FAT file system ripped off? (was Re: Stupid CP/M question)

From: D. Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Mon Jan 11 20:39:21 1999

>
> "D. Peschel" <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu> wrote:
> > It may comfort you to know that MS ripped off the FAT system (like
> > practically everything else).
>
> >From whom? (or what?)

TOPS-6, I believe. (Yes, that's an ancestor of TOPS-10.) The structure was
called the Storage Allocation Table and was pretty much the same idea.

Somewhere I probably still have have an e-mail message I got from one of the
TOPS developers, when I asked him about this topic.

> > And the original didn't even work very well!

> It worked fine, when you knew that there would never be media with a storage
> capacity greater than about 1,025,024 bytes, i.e., the original 86-DOS with
> 8-inch double-sided double-density diskettes.

Except for the problem of corruption, lost chains, and all that garbage.
(As I understand it, in some cases it's not possible to write a program to
fix errors, because there just isn't enough redundant information!) The
original TOPS-6 had the same problem.

-- Derek
Received on Mon Jan 11 1999 - 20:39:21 GMT