On 01/09/2017 11:51 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 01/09/2017 09:28 AM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Need there BE a filename?
An OS, particularly for a word processor, could have an IMPLICIT list
of filenames on a disk of DOCUMENT1 DOCUMENT2 DOCUMENT3
I found this document:
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA199551
about transferring Lanier "No Problem" files to a Unix (Gould 9050)
mini. The interchange program was a serial-comms program, so no value
to disk interpretation.
I suppose *if* you had a disk with the program on then it would give a
known name to be searching for... except that the doc seems to call it
TTY_ASCII in places and ASCII-TTY in others :-(
But apparently files were named--and some sort of name compression
appears to be in use as the name of the comms program is 9 characters
long, while the file name area appears to be only 8 bytes in length.
It seems unlikely that a simple system would resort to something like
frequency analysis of characters when encoding filenames, though,
particularly given the size of the data (the overhead would probably not
make it worthwhile) - so I'm guessing we should be looking at "plain text",
just with some unusual character size or distribution.
I did hack some quick code to alter the character size (6, 7 and 8 bits),
spacing between characters (0, 1 and 2 bits) and offset from the start of
the stream, then 'slide' the resulting data through the ASCII table and
search for the "LTER" name that you mentioned previously, but without any
luck. That does make the assumption that values for A-Z are contiguous,
which seems likely but not certain.
I didn't look at 5 bit characters, which is a possibility if only alpha
characters and not numerics are allowed in filenames.
I'm not sure if filenames are stored in their entirety, though - I think
there was an example in that PDF which seemed to imply that pages have
their own short names, and that these might be concatenated to form an
overall name for the group of pages - I need to do more than just skim-read
the document to understand that. It makes me wonder if there isn't some
very short (2 or 3 character) limit on individual directory entries though,
and these are chained together to make a larger name (and file)?
cheers
Jules
