At Fri, 5 Mar 2021 11:44:49 -0500, M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: Subject: [TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab Using tabs to save space was definitely more than an urban legend for some of us! (but there is a caveat below) When I started at UofCalgary we had a PDP-11/60 running 7th Edition (with about 16 terminals). It had an RX-02 mounted into the terminal room wall (the computer room was of course on the other side of the wall, with a nice big window so we could see the blinken lights (which are of course very few on an 11/60, but enough to tell when it was most busy churning the disks). Students were strongly encouraged to buy 8-1/2" disks at the books store and off-load anything they were not directly working on at any given time. (And when we upgraded to a VAX 11/780 with BSD, disk quotas were implemented as soon as possible.) Some of us found that we could fit considerably more data on those disks if we made sure we used tabs everywhere possible. We also obviously learned to have a "clean" target in our makefiles and to be sure to use it before we archived anything! However I think we were probably using tar, not a filesystem, on the floppies so that would of course have been what allowed for greater savings. I don't remember many of the details, though I do remember there was a program to reserve and "lock" the drive, and I think it changed the ownership of the device file(s) to the user requesting the reservation. As for the size of tabs, well I seem to recall students also traded tabstop setup files for various kinds of terminals so that each could see code indentations at their own preferred size. (Maybe this was done more on the Multics system though, and/or it was in the pre-Vi days when we used a custom full-screen editor called Fred.) -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>