Simplest (practical) file system?

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Sun Jul 27 12:51:00 2003

This sounds just about right, vintage-wise!

Ok, so once you have a hole, do you only recover that disk space by
SQUEEZEing the disk?

I think RT-11 works this way, at least I recall the SQUEEZE command
making the disk free space
larger.

Is a FAT needed for this, or is there a simple way to calculate this on
the fly?

Jim Battle wrote:

>>
>
> The wang 2200 that I have (pre 1975) has two modes:
>
> 1) direct access. the program and read or write any absolutely
> address sector, which is 256 bytes. this isn't what you asked for.
>
> 2) random access tape. the first N sectors of the disk contain a
> catalog of files on the disk. an entry consists of 8 bytes of
> filename, two bytes of starting sector, two bytes of final sector (or
> is it size?) and an attribute byte (program/data). it is quite
> primitive. if you want to create a data file, you must first reserve
> all the space you will ever need for it. unused parts of the file
> still take up space. if the file does grow bigger than you had already
> preallocated, you must basically shuffle files around on disk to make
> room. when you delete a file, it just makes a hole in your map. all
> sectors are allocated linearly.
>
> it is very simple, but not too convenient.
Received on Sun Jul 27 2003 - 12:51:00 BST

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