[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Wesley Parish]

'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 at kjorling.se>:

> On 8 Sep 2017 17:04 -0400, from jnc at 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 •
> michael at kjorling.se
>  “People who think they know everything really annoy
>  those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
>  



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