In article <hmlvas$2a...@reader1.panix.com>, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote: >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.
My programming reference manual for MSDOS 6.0 (1993) states the FCB stuff as "superseded" (not obsolete or obsolescent). It states: "A programmer should not use a superseded function except to maintain compatibility with versions of MS-DOS earlier than version 2.0." FCB did *not* support paths, but you could access the current directory. >-- >Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! I had a lease on an Groetjes Albert -- -- Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters. alb...@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
