[TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?

[John Cowan]

Tony Finch scripsit:

> I was slightly startled by the coolness of the idea when I found out that
> nvi uses Berkeley DB as its storage layer; its recno access method
> makes a text file look like a random-access array of strings.

Classical sequential files, however, were simply random-access files
such that seeking to line n was just a matter of seeking to byte
n * MAXCHARSLINE.  The last time I actually used such a thing was
on an early Tandem system when I was implementing the Software Tools.
Editable source used a different format, so I set things up so that
the Tools could either read source format or sequential format and
then wrote sequential format.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
At the end of the Metatarsal Age, the dinosaurs abruptly vanished.
The theory that a single catastrophic event may have been responsible
has been strengthened by the recent discovery of a worldwide layer of
whipped cream marking the Creosote-Tutelary boundary.  --Science Made Stupid