[TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?
Dave Horsfall
dave at horsfall.org
Tue Mar 22 00:11:07 AEST 2016
On Fri, 18 Mar 2016, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
> At least in my experience, editing the "deck of cards" (and certainly,
> editing anything on magnetic tape) was really painful -- there was no
> way to move blocks of text around -- you started at the beginning of the
> file and had to edit lines in order (one shot per line) until you got to
> the end. You could add lines or delete them, but only when you came to
> them. The editor copied the edited file into an output file, and then
> you had to do another step to copy the new version back over the
> original one.
Memories of IEBUPDTE come to me... A very useful program, when it came to
doing things, ahem, not allowed by the computer centre, by us Comp Sci
kiddies...
Ah, the time I got SPITBOL to work beyond its use-by date, for example;
the thing was riddled with date checks (the first one was obvious, but the
rest not so much; its endearing habit was to jump to whatever was in R0 at
the time). I wrote something that searched for that particular date
string, and after inspecting the surrounding binary code I patched it...
> The first time I tried to edit the deck on disc, I specified the output
> file to be equal to the input file. The program did not check this, and I
> ended by nuking about 20% of the card images! Luckily I had a listing...
> I punched out the trash on the disc and spent an entire weekend
> rearranging and repunching the cards to get back to where I had been...
[...]
And who here hasn't done "cat file ... > file"?
> It just goes to show that I should have taken my mother's advice --
> before you throw out a deck of cards, put a rubber band around it!
Walking down the corridors of Comp Sci, a student in front of me dropped
his entire deck of approx 2000 cards, all over the floor... I have no
idea whether he got them sorted, but I sure as hell used rubber bands
after that!
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
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