[TUHS] Re: 'Huge' file support removed from PWB1

Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> writes: They did make various changes to the system to protect against resource exhaustion in what was a genuine production multi-user facility, and might possibly have made such a change to ensure that a runaway process couldn't write a file more than a megabyte in size. It's not mentioned in the PWB article in the special UNIX issue of the Bell System Technical Journal, though, and that article does describe various changes they'd made, explaining how and why. However: PWB grew out of Research, side by side with it, evaluating and adopting changes along the way. They aimed to stay mostly in synch, but chose to keep and maintain a number of differences. Maybe they started their work before the "huge" file support was introduced, and then simply did not include that change? It's a backward incompatible change (at least if you have at least one file that already uses the last indirect block of its inode), and they might have decided to cross that bridge if and when they ever got to it. -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay