Re: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?

It may seem strange to us today, but in the context of the day, one of the most radical ideas in Unix was the concept of a file as an array of bytes, with lines separated by newline characters. Most mainframes had file systems that were more or less decks of cards on disk (at one point, the Bell Labs computing centers estimated that 2/3 of the disc was taken up with trailing blanks. Layered on top of this was a bit of cruft that also made the file look like a magnetic tape holding punch card images. So files had "blocking factors" (how many cards in a contiguous block of disc). In the GE (later Honeywell) time sharing system, to create a file, you entered a subsystem which asked you nearly a dozen questions (name, initial size, maximum size, device, permissions, etc.) and stored up your answers and finally did a system call to create the file. The usual result was that something was wrong in your answer to question 5 and you had to do the whole dance over again from the top. If you managed to create a file, the subsystem congratulated you by printing: Successful! In this world, typing echo hello Joe >foo in Unix, and thereby creating a file, seemed like a miracle -- typically a first-timer's jaw would drop when I said we had created a file named foo and showed them that it had contents. Their response was typically about 30 seconds of "But... but.... but... but..." followed by a blinding grin when they "got it". Steve