[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[wes.parish@paradise.net.nz (Wesley Parish)]

To give an example of what one other operating system means by records, I point you in the direction 
of:
http://www.conceptsolutionsbc.com/mvs-articles/197-mvs-file-system

"Windows and *NIX file systems are based on hierarchical directory structure. Basically, you have one 
root directory and you can create directories (sometimes called folders) or files under that root 
directory. Mainframe disk files are very different to this hierarchical approach."

"MVS datasets always have record lengths. MVS access methods read and write records in physical 
blocks. A block is made up of one or more logical record. This diagram shows the block sizes and 
difference between fixed block and variable block data sets.

The access method is responsible for splitting the block into logical records and passing the record to 
the program. Although a program can handle breaking the blocks into logical records, this task is 
normally done by the access method. A record length can be fixed or variable."

If you're familiar with the Network and Hierarchical Database systems from practical experience or from 
working through non-relational dbms books, this all looks very familiar. Essentially such file systems 
are hierarchical dbmses. As should be expected from MVS's derivation from batch systems.

I don't know anything about the DEC VAX VMS file system. I was meaning to learn a few years ago, but 
other things happened ...

FWVLIW

Wesley Parish

Quoting Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com>:

> On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 07:31:30AM -0400, Ron Natalie wrote:
> > Maintaining records iwas far from unheard of at the time networking
> showed up in UNIX. Think about how the UNIX tape driver works.
> 
> I think that unix "records" are just a struct in binary in the file.
> That's a
> little different (a lot different?) than what most operating systems
> mean by
> records. Unless I'm mistaken.
>  



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