26 Mar
2016
26 Mar
'16
8:30 p.m.
On 2016-03-26 20:43, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 11:09 PM, Charles Anthony <
charles.unix.pro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Some other people already mentioned this, but... - SIXBIT. DEC might
have used baudot in the very early machines, but I would say that SIXBIT
dominated here for a long time. We see it both in the PDP-8, but also
the PDP-6 and its follow ons. RAD50 was the natural extension of SIXBIT
on a machine that did not have a word size that was a multiple of 6.
The x.y filename, as well as the 6+3 pattern predate the PDP-11. I would
say that in this area, the PDP-11 didn't come with anything new, but
just made life more complicated.
OS/8 for sure only have 6+2 filenames, but still in the x.y form.
TOPS-10 have, I think, 6+3. And the Monitor (I think that was the name
for the PDP-6 OS) was, I think, also 6+3.
And it was all SIXBIT.
And SIXBIT also give you the case folding.
I say the PDP-11 complicated life just because DEC was already so much
into having filenames stored more compact than normal text, and having a
6+3 pattern, so they came up with R50, which fits the bill, but it's
more headache than it was worth, if you ask me.
Since the PDP-11 have 8 bit bytes, it would have made much more sense to
just store filenames as 8 bit bytes. It would have cost some more
storage, but not that much. But it took time for DEC to realize that the
space savings here were not really a good tradeoff. Old habits die hard,
I guess.
By the way, RSX (and early VMS) actually use 9+3 filenames.
>And Dec's RADIX-50, packing 3 characters
into 16 bits. (IIRC the origin of
>the 6.3 filenames. bit I can't document that.)
Sort of.... before ASCII, DEC used a few other 5 bit codes that were
around such as baudot (look at the PDP-1/4 etc and KSR 28). RAD50 was a
natural scheme for storing file name and using bits efficiently.
Which, of course, lead to the abomination of case folding - it's not a bug,
it's a feature 😂
RAD50 gave us the x.y file name form with the implied dot et al. 6.3 and
later 8.3 were natural directions from that coding. Using the .3 ext as a
type tag of course followed that naturally given that's all that was stored
in the disk "catalog." [And CP/M and PC/MS-DOS inherit that scheme -
including the case folding silliness even though by that time all keyboard
were upper and lower case and they stored the files in 8 bits]. UNIX of course, would put the "type" in the
file itself (magic #) and force
the storing of the dot, but removed the strict mapping of name and type.
Having grown up in both systems, I see the value of each; but agree I think
I find UNIX's scheme better and lot more flexible.
I think I agree on the point of having filenames in a free format. Not
sure I really like storing the type in the file itself. So I'm sortof
torn. Or rather, I would like to keep type separate from both.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol