I'm not sure that the file and directory structure was all that innovative (after all, the biologists had been doing that kind of thing forever...). But the file as a lightweight flick-of-the-wrist-create-able entity was mind blowing. At the time, the IBM 360 required that you run a special job step to create a file (we're talking punched cards here). And then you had to pull that job step out of the deck because trying to create a file that already existed was an error. In the GE/Honeywell time sharing system, you had to invoke a subsystem that asked you 8 or 10 questions (name, what device was it on, how big is upon creation, how big could it grow to, what was its record size, etc.). It stored up your answers and then handed them to the OS. It was easy to get a question wrong, in which case it sent you back to the beginning to do the dance again. Most telling, when the file was finally created the subsystem exited with the happy message "Successful!"
For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw dropping. Many people had to have it explained twice, because they literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily. I had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and probably gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...
Steve
PS: It was about this time that a survey of the mainframe computer centers found that over 50% of the (costly, limited) disc space consisted of trailing blanks of 80-column card images stored on disc.
----- Original Message -----
From:
"Wesley Parish" <wes.parish@paradise.net.nz>
To:
<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:
Sat, 09 Sep 2017 13:16:30 +1200 (NZST)
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!
'fraid so. The Unix directory structure and the correlating free-form file competed with the file-as-
record-structure and directory-as-record-structure in the seventies and eighties. The competition had
finished by the nineties, and hardly anybody remembers it now.
Seriously, how many grandmothers can you think of who would know how to allocate disk space for a
photo of their grandkids? Who would be able to guess how many bytes a letter might take up?
Free-form files and directory nodes (with the corresponding requirement that the OS know how to
allocate and reallocate disk space) helped democratize computing.
Just my 0.02c :)
Wesley Parish
Quoting Michael Kjörling <michael@kjorling.se>:
> On 8 Sep 2017 17:04 -0400, from jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa):
> > We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which has
> managed
> > to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix).
>
> Like directories, and free-form files (collections of bytes as opposed
> to collections of records)?
>
> --
> Michael Kjörling ⢠https://michael.kjorling.se â¢
> michael@kjorling.se
> âPeople who think they know everything really annoy
> those of us who know we donât.â (Bjarne Stroustrup)
>
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