9 Sep
2017
9 Sep
'17
7:16 a.m.
'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(a)kjorling.se>:
On 8 Sep 2017 17:04 -0400, from
jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa):
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
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 â¢
michael(a)kjorling.se
âPeople who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we donât.â (Bjarne Stroustrup)