From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: random832@fastmail.com (Random832)
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2016 13:45:39 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?
In-Reply-To: <24e7ae828a0086db2f79ea66165b80bf.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com>
References: <20160318004832.GA18245@minnie.tuhs.org>
 <alpine.BSF.2.11.1603181854360.15730@aneurin.horsfall.org>
 <20160318084234.GB64087@server.rulingia.com>
 <CAC20D2M_TUXCq+vESvKYriBpvpLcMyEezPER+U-uhRZun5nCzA@mail.gmail.com>
 <24e7ae828a0086db2f79ea66165b80bf.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com>
Message-ID: <1458323139.767071.553262498.2A8E1982@webmail.messagingengine.com>

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016, at 13:12, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
> It may seem strange to us today, but in the context of the day, one of
> the most radical ideas in Unix was the concept of a file as an array of
> bytes, with lines separated by newline characters.  Most mainframes had file
> systems that were more or less decks of cards on disk

Of course, I assume the answer to the question of why everyone didn't do
that is that there's a trade-off: We take for granted today that you
can't change a line in the middle of a text file without moving
everything after it, either by reading the whole thing into memory and
writing back the changed version, or creating a copy of the file with
the changes and replacing the original with it afterwards, but I assume
these "deck of cards" style files had provisions for editing one in the
middle. You also can't seek to a given line number in a file.