> From: Donn Terry <donnte...@gmail.com> > Sent: Friday, November 1, 2019 3:37 PM > To: Scott Lurndal <slurn...@sonic.net> > Cc: Danny Niu <danny...@hotmail.com>; Austin Group Mailing List > <austin-group-l@opengroup.org> > Subject: Re: What is this out-of-scope thing called Record IO?
> That's correct. At the time the spec was written most OSs (and there were a > lot more different ones > then) were loosely modeled on the punch-card systems that preceded them, > which means that I/O occurred > in fixed sized "records". (Well, everybody but (that time's version of) CDC > used that term > consistently to mean "a big, custom sized, punch card on (typically) tape".) > The stream of data we now > take for granted was a real innovation in Unix. > Donn To expand on this, the dd utility (itself named after a mainframe command used to specify record organization) can be used to convert between mainframe-style files and Unix stream of data style files.
