Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

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"get-a-byte, get-a-byte, get-a-byte, byte, byte" - Dave Cutler https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14150/how...

>Windows I/O weirdness. You really don't realize how strange it is until you

"can I get a wut... WUT?" - Developers, Developers, Developers

====

it's just hard for people today to understand what a revolution stdin and stdout was, full 8 bit but sticking with ASCII as much as possible. There was nothing about it that limited Unices from having whatever performant I/O underneath, but it gave programmers at the terminal the ability to get a lot done right from the command line.

The web itself is an extension of stdin and stdout, and the subsequent encrusting of simple HTTP/HTML/et al standards with layer upon layer of goop that calls for binary blobs can be seen as the invasion of Cutlerian-like mentalities. It's sad that linux so successfully took over that all the people who we were happy to let use IIS and ASP and ActiveX had to come over to this side with their ideas. No idea of which is bad, but which together are incoherent.

client server FTW, bring it back

"No idea of which is bad, but which together are incoherent."

Right, my complaint about filename/path length being exceeded in my earlier post often occurs when a web page is saved by a browser (some web pages have outrageously long filenames).

Incidentally, many years ago I did a tour of Microsoft's operation in Seattle around the time Microsoft introduced subdirectories into MSDOS and the tour guide (can't recall his name but he was responsible for the development of MS's Flight Simulator) gave a considerable spiel about why Microsoft decided to run with the backslash instead of the forward one as per Unix. Even then, I thought 'oh no, here comes confusion', and others with me thought the same. When we challenged him about it, he said we (Microsoft), want to clearly differentiate ourselves from Unix (there was an arrogance about his answer that I well remember).

Flight Simulator was developed outside Microsoft, but within Microsoft you could only be referring to Alan Boyd. I received a similar tour.

I'm sure you heard what you thought you heard, arrogance and all, but iirc it was backslash because IBM insisted the slash be the switch character. Anybody remember $SWITCHAR

I know Flight Simulator was originally developed outside MS and I think my tour wasn't that long after MS acquired it.

It's too long ago for me to associate the name 'Alan Boyd' with the person in question but I do remember that he had a loud, penetrating self-assured voice. (Incidentally, he spent considerable time demonstrating Flight Simulator's new features).

You're right, IBM was a large part of the discussion as back then it was the principal client for MSDOS. However, I came away from the visit with the understanding that MS was in full agreement with IBM's decision despite MS's dabblings with Unix.

I had a particular interest at the time as I had a S-100 Godbout CompuPro computer, and in addition to CP/M, I ended up putting Seattle Computer Products' DOS (SB86 from Lifeboat Associates) on it which meant that I had compatibility with MSDOS.

I can understand why MS would have wanted to differentiate MSDOS and the backslash being one way, what I'm still not clear about is why IBM would have wanted to make such a distinction.

Re $SWITCHAR, very vaguely, but from my point it added confusion. Like some other commands its implementation and architecture appeared to be the result of afterthought rather than good design. I've forgotten much of that stuff.

At least Windows paths are not as clunky as Cutler's prior operating system, VAX/VMS Version 1.00 21-AUG-1978 15:54.

  $ create/directory dm0:[foobar]
  $ set default dm0:[foobar]
  $ copy DM0:[SYSMGR]SYSTARTUP.COM example.txt
  $ dir/full

  DIRECTORY DM0:[FOOBAR]
  21-APR-23 14:42

  EXAMPLE.TXT;1 (615,2) 0./0. 21-APR-23 14:42 [1,4] [RWED,RWED,RWED,RE]

  TOTAL OF 0./0. BLOCKS IN 1. FILE

I rather liked VMS conventions as it was immediately obvious what was the directory part of the path and what was the filename and the device. You could create virtual devices as well, so for example, with VMS TeX, I had TEX_ROOT defined to point to the root of the TeX distribution and you would have TEX_ROOT:[INPUTS] for the input directory, TEX_ROOT:[MF] for Metafont files, TEX_ROOT:[EXE] for executables, etc. and everything was logically arranged. CLD files were another wonderful thing where you could define your CLI interface in an external file and let the OS handle argument and option parsing for you.

> I rather liked VMS conventions as it was immediately obvious what was the directory part of the path and what was the filename and the device.

1. unix doesn't expose devices in the file tree, and thank the [deity] for that

2. directory part: everything to the last /

3. filename: everything afte the last /

4. TEX_ROOT=/foo/bar; cd $TEX_ROOT/MF

Could it be any easier?

> unix doesn't expose devices in the file tree

I mean, they are exposed as files (e.g. /dev/sda) within the file tree, but they aren’t exposed by a file path.

Maybe parent is talking about the fact that you don’t know whether bar in foo/bar is a file or a directory?

On 2 & 3, what if you have a directory? There’s no easy way to tell whether /foo/bar is a directory or a file. FOO:[BAR] must be a directory.

I have a vague notion that there might have been the ability to have a virtual device span multiple directories, but as I think about it, this seems unlikely since it would make it ambiguous where something would be created if a directory exists in both root1 and root2, so perhaps not. It’s been 23 years since I last used VMS and 30 since it was my daily driver though, so it’s hard for me to say too much.

Clunky? Version control built in, distributed FS built in...

The downside of building in stuff is that you can't easily replace it. I don't have any VMS experience, but the versioned file systems I've studied are very far from being a replacement for what I would consider version control today. They're more like the automatic writing of backup files in Emacs.

Distributed FS sounds like something with a huge design space. It's better to do that in userspace. Was Plan 9 really the first time virtual file systems could be implemented in userspace? It seems like such an obviously useful idea in retrospect.

The diff3 utility for 3-way merge appeared after the VMS debut (1979).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3

Can you really call what we see in VMS full revision control when it lacks this capability?

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