On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Marko Mäkelä <msmakela@gmail.com> wrote: > Sorry, I could not resist the off-topic. > > As far as I understand, CP/M copied the file name conventions (except > subdirectories and file versions) from Digital VAX/VMS, which was supposed > to replace the archaic *nix systems. CP/M predates VMS by several years. Whatever it inherited from DEC operating systems must have come from either RT-11 or TOPS-10 (I've seen references to both, though what I remember from "back in the day" it was RT-11). > BTW, VMS distinguished binary and ASCII files, too. Yes, and more. VMS doesn't really have a "stream of bytes" mentality that's common to UNIX and many personal computer operating systems. It's record oriented. Even plain text files are made of collections of records of variable-length (not null-terminated or CRLF terminated lines of bytes). It was fun moving things to and from VMS as a result (there were tools for encapsulating the record formats - in the same tradition as Mac tools that preserved the resource forks). Programs written in C depend on a lot of invisible glue in the C run-time libraries to simulate what is "normal" on a UNIX machine in terms of file I/O. -ethan Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2011-11-28 01:00:07
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