It was thus said that the Great Sipke de Wal once stated:
>
> Even now MS-DOS still has the old FCBS. These are the File Control Block
> structure that
> CP/M uses to keep files open. Some old Turbo Pascal 3.0 software still uses
> it.
> MS-DOS 3.0 mostly did away with that and intruduced filehandles.
> But even in MS-DOS 4.0 the FCBS structures were still used in conjunction
> with the SHARE.EXE utility to allow harddisks larger than 32MB
File handles were introduced with MS-DOS 2.0. MS-DOS 2.0 used the
underlying FCBs to handle the new file handle code, whereas with 3.0 it was
finally reversed (the FCB code used the underlying file handle code).
MS-DOS could handle larger partitions than 32MB. The limitation were the
number of clusters MS-DOS could handle---65530 (not quite 65536 as a few
values were used for flags and I don't recall the exact number). Increase
the cluster size (which MS-DOS was flexible enough to handle) and you could
use larger harddrives. But for large number of small files a lot of the
disk space would be wasted and who's to say if third party utilities could
deal with a non-standard cluster size?
-spc (Gah! I still remember this stuff!)
Received on Fri Apr 07 2000 - 16:44:03 BST
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