On 2009-01-12, John Machin <sjmac...@lexicon.net> wrote:
> I didn't think your question was stupid. Stupid was (a) CP/M recording
> file size as number of 128-byte sectors, forcing the use of an in-band
> EOF marker for text files (b) MS continuing to regard Ctrl-Z as an EOF
> decades after people stopped writing Ctrl-Z at the end of text files.
I believe that "feature" was inherited by CP/M from DEC OSes
(RSX-11 or RSTS-11). AFAICT, all of CP/M's file I/O API
(including the FCB) was lifted almost directly from DEC's
PDP-11 stuff, which probably copied it from PDP-8 stuff.
Perhaps in the early 60's somebody at DEC had a reason. The
really interesting thing is that we're still suffering because
of it 40+ years later.
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at poem about pork brains and
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