The whole ASCII-EBCDIC thing certainly has been a huge costprobably, as Gil suggests, as large as the other two combined. But Id argue that it wasnt necessarily either EBCDIC or ASCIIs fault, just that they evolved in parallel and neither truly won [insert another debate about what winning would mean here: clearly in terms of number of systems and raw horsepower, ASCII won; in terms of business criticality, z holds its own, or it would presumably no longer exist]. The NTS thing always struck me as hopelessly naïve, and case sensitivity as some combination of naïveté and laziness.
I understand that PDP horsepower was quite low, and so both of these made sense at the time. That doesnt make them good or smart design decisions. Of course its easy to Monday-morning quarterback this. The funny part about case sensitivity is that if you ask a *ix person why its good, they almost universally assert that it is, but cannot come up with a reason why, OR a case where you would deliberately mix two files or commands with the same letters but different case (CONFIG.txt and config.txt, et sim). Ive also always been surprised that no *ix implementation ever bit the bullet and tried to fix case sensitivity. Windows, of course, got it right; alas, given the historical antipathy *ix folks have for Windoze, I fear thats all the more reason it will never get fixed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
