On 2010-03-03, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote: > On 2010-03-03, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: >> Grant Edwards wrote: >> >>> Just a mediocre copy of the CP/M filesystem, which was in turn >>> copied from DEC's RSTS or RSX. >> >> It was actually an improvement over CP/M's file system. CP/M >> didn't have hierarchical directories > > Neither did the original MS-DOS filesystem. > >> or timestamps and recorded file sizes in 128-byte blocks >> rather than bytes. > > I thought that was true of the original MS-DOS filesystem as > well, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
I definitely remember that old MS-DOS programs would treat Ctrl-Z as an EOF marker when it was read from a text file and would terminate a text file with a Ctrl-Z when writing one. I don't know if that was because the underlying filesystem was still did everything in blocks or if it was because those MS-DOS programs were direct ports of CP/M programs. I would have sworn that the orignal MS-DOS file API was FCB based and worked almost exactly like CP/M. IIRC, the "byte stream" API showed up (in the OS) sever versions later. The byte stream API was implemented by many compiler vendor's C libraries on top of the block-oriented FCB API. -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! I had a lease on an at OEDIPUS COMPLEX back in gmail.com '81 ... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list